


Concerning Roses, and the Keepers of the Bees

by hitlikehammers



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Fluff, Happy Ending, Love, Love Confessions, M/M, Multi, Oaths & Vows, Other, Polyamory, Polyamory Negotiations, Re-works His Last Vow Canon to a Considerable Degree, Relationship Negotiation, Romance, Unconventional Families, Valentine's Day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-01
Updated: 2014-02-14
Packaged: 2018-01-10 16:48:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 28,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1162135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hitlikehammers/pseuds/hitlikehammers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock knows he's the odd man out—that a marriage is built for two, and there are <i>limits</i>, and what he shares with John and Mary is fantastic, but he's not labouring under any delusions: three's a bit of a crowd. </p><p>He loves them, though, and this wretched holiday does give him a culturally-sanctioned guise through which to show it.</p><p>John and Mary know that Sherlock's necessary: absolutely vital to their happiness, their marriage, their well-being, and to the family they're building, because three isn't a crowd, it's <i>perfect</i>. It's <i>them</i>.</p><p>And they <i>love</i> him, and what better time than Valentine's to make it as official as they can?</p><p> <br/><span class="small">For <a href="http://snogandagrope.tumblr.com/post/71365332209/three-is-a-crowd-but-also-allowed">this prompt</a>; including: Miscommunications, resolutions, the exchanging of informal-but-utterly-heartfelt vows, cuddling, an overabundance of feelings, and Sherlock's unmitigated antipathy toward glittery greeting cards.</span></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Part One

**Author's Note:**

> All of the thanks to [snogandagrope](http://archiveofourown.org/users/snogandagrope) for encouraging and reading snippets and dealing with my nonsense and beta-ing and being stellar. 
> 
> And thank you to [speakmefair](http://archiveofourown.org/users/speakmefair) for convincing me it wasn't stupid for me to write more things, when I was sad and very much of the opinion that writing _any_ things, ever, was very, very dumb.
> 
> Not Britpicked, only partially acknowledging _His Last Vow_ , completely disregarding aspects of canon timeline, and overall, totally indulgent. Play along, yes? Okay, great.

It is everywhere. Everywhere.

Microbits of reflective plastic in various pastel hues. Sparkling and shimmering, apparently innocuous; explosive, _insidious._ Holographic debris. 

The flat’s a veritable warzone, _glitter_ creeping into his hallowed domain on holiday-card Trojan horses.

The _nerve_.

The sharply folded panels of paper stock are sitting on the table, slightly bowed, flapping half-to-half at their pristine edges with every near-frantic exhale that escapes him as he stares at them, brow furrowed, because how. _How_. 

He is a detective. He is brilliant beyond common comprehension. There are few enough mysteries in the world that his deductive prowess proves less than a match for.

And yet, this. This is mildly unprecedented. This does not adhere to logic.

The cards, the flowing script upon them glitters in the light of his lit cigarette, the nicotine doing nothing, absolutely _nothing_ to help.

 _Love_.

That common word printed, gilded at the very top of each front-panel is beyond his capacity to articulate around the tightness, the lightness in his chest.

He blows out smoke, long and controlled: only just. The cards flutter for the breath of it. Sherlock glares at them.

Valentine's Day. The single most manipulative farce he can fathom in modern culture.

His heart stumbles, trips, and he starts against the sensation.

 _Liar_.

The cards, sitting, twinkling: they mock him for his breathlessness, for the tremble in his hand around the butt of his full-tars. For the pull and twist in his chest and the way that _sentiment_ is poisoning him, filling him: has reached a fever pitch he never intended until he vibrates with it, until it inheres with the very cadence of his pulse, until it resonates in his cellular metabolism and drives him, consumes, flutters in him like gossamer wings, dives swift much like falling.

The cards—created for, crafted in the interest of, expressing the endeavour, the horrible agony of _loving_ : the cards, untouched on the tabletop just so: they hatefully mock him for that very thing. 

Bastards. 

_______________________________

 

In retrospect, if he's honest against the truth revealed in the collated data, the incident itself was not, in fact, the most arduous part of the process.

That does not negate the fact that the experience of searching out, entering, and perusing the absolute nimiety of options in Cards Galore amidst a godforsaken _hoard_ of mindless, lovelorn buffoons was a veritable trial by fire.

After the first two hours pacing the the same aisle, studying the same rows of insipid sentiments committed to pinking-sheared sheets of colored cardboard, however, he can no longer wholly deny that he is of a similar mould.

Lovelorn buffoon.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. 

“Need any help?”

The sales associate who approaches is young, single—by choice; houses three cats, only two of which she rightfully owns. Nickel allergy. Push-up bra: ineffective at both increasing her negligible cleavage and hiding the nipple piercing on the left. Purportedly vegan, but she cheats. 

Her voice, though: he voice is sweet; genuine. Her assistance is offered not of obligation, but of a desire to give.

Intriguing. 

“Hmm,” he hums at her, noncommittal. 

“You’ve been browsing for a bit, yeah? Not finding what you’re after?”

“Hmm.” 

He stares at the cards, the cards that taunt him, long after her foot steps retreat.

“Sure you don’t need anything?” The woman’s returned. “Maybe an extra pair of eyes? If you told me the type of person you were buying for—”

He stares at her blankly. He doesn’t know how much time has passed.

“Right,” she looks away, takes the hint. “Well, let me know. If you do need a hand.” Her tone is bright, though. Good for her.

Sherlock, however, suspects he requires far more than a hand in so dire a situation as this.

He breathes. He stares. He breathes.

He stares.

“Sir,” the voice—the woman again—is gentle at his shoulder. “Sorry, but, we’ll have to be closing up soon.”

Sherlock starts a bit, at that; glances out the front. It’s grown dark. He coughs, uncomfortable, a just a bit cold against the rising of despair in his stomach, through his chest.

“Apologies,” he says, stilted. “I hadn’t,” he breathes, shakes his head: “noticed.”

She’s quiet, doesn’t respond: considers him for a long moment before seeming to reach a conclusion of some significance, given the shift of her stance.

“Look, I really don’t mean to pry, just,” she exhales slowly: “You’ve been here my whole shift, staring at this wall, and if I’ve learned anything at this job, a man who stares at the wall of Valentine’s cards for a whole day isn’t the sort of man who really wants to go home empty handed.” 

She looks at him. Waits.

His mouth, he finds, is unexpectedly dry.

“Valentine’s isn’t so scary, you know,” she hedges, tries again to connect, and he wants to deny that he looks fearful, that he feels apprehension of any variety or degree: he wants to lie.

But there’s not enough energy in him to craft a falsehood so immense.

“It’s a holiday celebrated and named for a massacre.” It’s not, obviously. The romantic connotations predate the killings—and the saint, of course, predates even that.

He tries to infuse the cliche with a great disdain.

He fails.

“You’ve not spent your entire day staring at massacre cards, though,” the young woman points out, a quirk to her lips as she eyes him knowingly: “You’ve been staring at cards about love.”

He blinks, and it’s only after a long stretch of silence that he realises his eyes are fluttering at the same rate as his pulse, in perfect time. 

“Valentine’s isn’t really about a massacre, or about chocolates or flowers and whatnot,” and Sherlock notes that she’s wearing a name badge that she hadn’t been, before: _Shannon_. “It’s an excuse to get up your courage and tell the person you love just that,” she meets his eyes, and he reads her own courage in that stare: “That you love them.”

That courage. 

It reminds him of John, but…

His chest tightens. Not _only_ John. 

And therein lies the dilemma. 

“The person you came here to buy a card for,” she asks pointedly: “do you love them?”

He doesn’t know what decides it, doesn’t know what prompts him to do anything more than sneer at this woman and walk away—certainly cannot fathom what spur his breath to catch, his throat to close as he chokes out, drowning:

“I,” and there’s the catch, just there as he exhales, thin: “More than I thought I was capable of.”

And it’s true. Dear god, it is more true than any certainty he’s ever held, than any fact he’s built his world around.

Fuck.

“Then they’re already a lucky sod, I’d say,” she smiles encouragingly. “And they probably know it well enough, so maybe,” she leans in, eyeing him a bit warily, judging his boundaries as her voice lowers just a touch: “Just maybe, it doesn’t matter which of these you get,” she gestures expansively to the overwhelming array of violet, of red and pink.

“What matters is what’s in here,” and she looks like she means to reach for him, to touch, and he must tense, or she must think twice, or both, because her arm curves awkwardly and settles at the centre of her own chest.

It feels, somehow, as if she’s nonetheless pressed against his own for the pressure there; the warmth.

“The heart is not actually the seat of feeling, you know,” he forces out, hoarse for it: weak.

“Oh, I’d fight you on that one,” she grins, a bit wistful, unabashed: “It’s not your brain that hums when you’re in love, now, is it?”

His pulse trills a bit, just then, stubborn bastard that it is.

The way her smile broadens, he’s half-convinced she knows it, could see it at his neck, or sense it with some cosmic resonance, some deep attunement to the ebb and flow of reality as it bends and gives.

“Tell me about the person that makes the not-brain bits of you hum, yeah?” she coaxes, quiet and careful, as if he’s a frightened animal, a creature about to bolt and perhaps he is, for all that it pulls at him all wrong, unknown and ill-fitting: maybe that’s what the feeling in him does, what it has made of him.

“Tell me, and we’ll pick out a lovely card just for them.”

He blinks, and his heart kicks hard, and he realises, then, that his breathing’s coming far too fast to be going on with.

Perhaps the chemistry of the fluttering in his chest is primarily transformative: maybe the changes he’s feeling, _for_ feeling, are inevitable.

“Strong,” he manages to say it. “So strong, and brave. Magnificent. Always surprises me.” And Sherlock can’t fight the smile that rises, visceral, in his breath and his blood, that takes over his muscles and lifts, tugs at the corners of his lips and lifts him, buoyant, from the chest. 

“Essential.” The truth bubbles out from him, weightless and defiant of laws surrounding gravity, and Sherlock is guilty, he supposes.

“He,” Sherlock stumbles, as he tends to when he dwells on the fact, when he tries to grasp it and has to square with its immensity, its unutterable weight. “He is _essential_.”

The guilty always give themselves away. 

“Sounds wonderful,” Shannon says, and her smile is soft, now. Soft, and yes: he _is_ wonderful.

So wonderful as to make a shopgirl swoon at the mere mention of him, at the barest outline of his necessity.

And yet, he is only a part. If John Watson is _only_ anything, it is that he is only one part of a whole that Sherlock has not earned and is terrified, _terrified_ to lose.

“Witty.” His mouth moves before he can control it, before he can rein the shapes it makes as he contemplates that precious, impossible whole. “Intelligent, sly in the best sense. And the smile, her smile...”

Mary has such a beautiful smile. Like perhaps it’s hard to make, to form, or once was, but she’s not yet forgotten the strain: like it’s a gift hard-won, and catching a glimpse is a bit like spotting a sphynx.

He realises the shift in pronouns—the truth, out from the mouth of the _guity_ —and his eyes dart to Shannon’s: she’s just looking at him.

Just looking.

He breathes.

“They’re married,” he whispers, and the enormity of that fact—an enormity that had always been looming, always been waiting in the wings and yet had seemed distant, illusory for its insubstantiality, for its unwillingness to bear down and break: the enormity of what they are and what this is and what _he_ is in this equation overwhelms him, strains in his voice.

“And I,” he starts, cracks. “I’m, there’s not—”

He closes his eyes.

He breathe again.

“There’s not a card,” he says. “Not a card for that.”

“I’ve never sent a,” he pauses, swallows: “ a card,” he explains.

“There are one-hundred and fifty two cards associated with this holiday on display,” and his eyes run over them, one more time. “There is not a card for…”

His throat is closing, and his eyes are burning, and this is what he has become, this is what—

“Here.”

He turns, breathless, on the brink of a shameful panic: he hadn’t even noticed that Shannon was gathering cards from the wall beside them until she offers an handful, fanned between her fingers for his perusal.

“Any of these work?”

He stares at the cards, blindly; then he stares at her.

“What if I ruin it?”

He remembers sounding like that once: remembers sounding that small, that fragile, that broken.

He was a boy. 

They euthanised his dog.

He’d loved his dog, and he hadn’t been enough to make him stay.

“You won’t,” Shannon whispers.

“How would you know?” he asks, but it lacks his usual bite.

“I sell cards,” she smiles, rueful. “It’s my job to know.”

Sherlock thinks that, even if he had anything remotely appropriate to say—even if there were room for anything other than a roaring buzz running shrill inside his mind, the resonance of a thousand gongs at every end of the Palace—he’d be ill-equipped to voice it for the rising press of _emotion_ swelling upward from his chest.

Shannon—this stranger, this person who owes him nothing and yet is standing here with him, kind-eyed and earnest; she seems to understand.

This time, when she reaches for him, she makes contact; takes his hand.

He didn’t know he was trembling, until her palm steadies against him.

“Sometimes, we get dealt a shit hand,” she says simply, soft but firm. “And the world goes topside-over and love does break things, that’s true,” she nods, looks down before she meets his eyes.

“But I don’t think that this is one of those times,” she tells him, and somehow, _somehow_ , despite his lack of experience and the way his world seems glazed just now, honeyed and numbed through in ether: despite that, he knows what she says is meant. 

Wholeheartedly.

“They make your heart hum,” she squeezes around his knuckles, and chances a smile: “Yeah?”

They do. 

They _do_.

Sherlock glances at her, and plucks a selection of cards from her grasp, indiscriminate. He can’t stay here. He cannot stay here and _feel_ the heart in him flutter, far too distinct and defined, far too like wings in a cage. He can’t.

“These,” he says, and he’s lucky that much makes it out with any clarity.

“Perfect,” she grins, and there’s feeling and softness but no pity, and he’s grateful for that as he follows her to the till.

Quite grateful.

_______________________________

He returns to Baker Street, throws the cards on the kitchen table, and they narrowly miss the battery acid from his pre-dawn experiment regarding the effect of various dermatological conditions on the rate of chemical burns. He calls that an omen in favour of this questionable course of action, this written declaration of the deepest passions raging in him.

He scowls: it’s a horrible idea, and he doesn’t like when the universe conspires to commend horrible ideas.

Nothing good ever comes of it.

He doesn’t bother to hang his coat; drapes it instead across the chair—John’s chair, the one that smells of the same cheap aftershave that makes Sherlock’s chest seize for the familiarity, the closeness, the steadfast intimacy; aftershave, and Claire de la Lune, and if he drapes his coat there sometimes, just sometimes, the collar will absorb that perfect blend. 

_Christ_ , but he’s a lost cause.

He groans, and it echoes for the depth of it, the _hate_ of his, as he throws his body into his chair at the table, the seat groaning beneath the force of his weight as he huffs, as he considers the cards with disdain.

He bangs his knee against the closest table leg, watching the battery acid, willing it to spill and save him the agony in exchange for a minor bit of cauterisation. 

The acid does him no favours.

His scowl deepens. 

He shifts the remains of his experiment to the far side, and considers the three folds of cardstock before him. Fortune, perhaps, but more likely it’s simple probability—he has a genuine variety: _To The Man I Love_ , _To The Woman I Love_ , and _To The One Who Holds My Heart_. 

They’re equal parts glitter, damask, and floral, with a few touches of lace and ribbon: appalling. 

He grabs for what is arguably the worst of them, in terms of simple presentation: yet, the gender-unspecific option does give him the ability to adapt the card to fit them both—might save him a shred of his dignity.

Might make the difference between survival and cardiac arrest, for the way his pulse is racing, still.

He considers the front of the card:

Well, grammatically, that certainly will not do. He strikes the plural first before scrawling it in again where appropriate.

Better. Yet…

He angles the pen and draws around an overly-photoshopped bouquet of roses, highlighted unnaturally in pseudo-metallics:

He nods. _Better_.

His sense of approval is thoroughly diminished when he opens the card, exposing an interior covered entirely in text conveying not merely a similarly-woeful command of English grammar, but dear _god_ , the saccharine _tripe_ : he can feel the sear of bile at the back of his throat, it’s so vile.

He sighs, _deeply_ , and retrieves the pen.  
_______________________________

It’s only after Sherlock has succeeded in surpassing a 2:1 ratio of his own handwriting curled around the utter rubbish printed in the card itself—and it’s debatable, of course, but he’s made a point of increasing his knowledge of such things of late, and he is near- _certain_ that this card is, truly, a stain on the tapestry of even the most agonising declarations of human sentiment—

His mother _had_ always cautioned him about the perils of charting the most expedient course to one’s own apparent benefit.

He feels his mouth curl downward. He hates when his _mother_ , of all people, exhibits insight that surpasses his own.

Feeling, though, was a strong suit she failed to impart upon her offspring. And Sherlock had long thought that an unspeakable kindness of the natural order of things.

Now, he thinks the natural order might be a bit of a hateful prick.

He sighs, shuffling the cards and resigning himself to the inevitable. Two cards. Two testaments of the undeniable _ache_ consuming him.

Two written confessions to the _weakness_ in him.

 _It’s an excuse to get up your courage and tell the person you love just that,_ the voice floats back to him, the woman from the shop: _That you love them._

Courage, then.

Sherlock inhales, stares wide-eyed at the terrifying polygonal threats to his being, garnished in crimson and aubergine. 

Perhaps a strength, instead.

He grabs for the brighter of the two— _To The Woman I Love_ —and exhales slow. The print in this card is sparse, the white space overwhelming. His heart thumps hard, heavy and deep, rattling through him with a force that feels horrific, lethal, like it could tear him effortlessly in two pieces, four, eight until he is nothing but shuddering through the ribs, and that’s how it feels, really: that’s how it’s felt.

He is nothing, some days—too many—save a heart that trembles and shakes the foundations, threatens the lingering grasp he maintains on order, on reason: on a reality that exists where he does not _need_ so fully outside of himself.

He breathes.

He puts the pen to the paper and settles caution full in the battery acid that sits across the table, where it never belonged before, but aches to whither, now.

Fascinating. 

_______________________________

In the end, he has only enough courage for the task itself.

In the end, Sherlock musters the way his blood vibrates beneath the weight of it, spurred by a heart that beats out a love he doesn’t comprehend: in the end, he pours what he does not know and yet feels with absolute _rightness_ through his fingertips onto the paperstock, careful not to smudge the ink: careful to breathe through the sting in his eyes that speaks of something both terrifyingly violent and gorgeously fierce in him—that would give away far too much, if he’s misstepped, if he’s overreached, if he’s let the heart of him rule his head.

He manages to leap and bear suspension before the flight or fall, heart thrumming and making him nauseated, as he risks everything that taught him to hold anything so dear; as he risks assuming a place between two bodies, two minds, two hearts and souls that he has no right to, not truly. He gives, and seeks reciprocity, and surrenders to the unknown.

But this is all the fortitude he is able to spare. 

He knows they’ve planned a dinner—upscale, a couple’s night out; romantic, indulgent, passionate; he knows, because they’ve spoken of it openly in his company, and he’d long since managed to tamp down the pang at the thought of them celebrating Love’s day without him—has long since struggled with the need to recalibrate and force himself, train himself not to read fears into his absence, his removal from that perfect balance, that monogamy that reasserts, cultural conditioning at its finest.

Sherlock doesn’t need to be their equal, in this, he tells himself. He doesn’t need them to give him what they’ve only promised to one another. He doesn’t need them to cross boundaries or break rules. There are limits. He understands that.

But he can’t lose them. He can’t.

And god, but he loves them with all that he has.

So he knows when they’ll be out, knows their reservations and John’s tendency to err on the side of caution when it comes to timeliness. He knows when he can slip into their flat—he doesn’t even need to pick the lock; he has a key—and leave the cards on their front table, setting them down with trembling hands before scrambling backward, retracing his steps and retrieving them, breathless, unable to part with this piece of himself, this unveiling of the tenderest pieces of his shivering soul.

He inhales, sharp, clutching the cards to his chest in the dark.

 _Courage_.

He breathes out, slow, eyes slipping closed.

Courage.

He sets the cards back down and leaves before he can change his mind.


	2. Part Two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again to [snogandagrope](http://archiveofourown.org/users/snogandagrope) and [speakmefair](http://archiveofourown.org/users/speakmefair) for being amazing.
> 
> A few housekeeping notes:
> 
> a) Note the rating change. 
> 
> b) The brief discussion of polygamous themes and polygamy as practiced around the world herein is _not_ intended to be in _any_ way offensive—just as a catch-all, in case it rubs anyone the wrong way. 
> 
> c) My het-smut abilities are a touch rusty—sorry if that shows; I've been writing men getting it on rather exclusively for a good bit.
> 
> d) Please feel free to reconcile this fic with _His Last Vow_ however you wish, but in my head, for this? Mary's past is out in the open, and they've dealt with Magnussen accordingly: how much of the violence, suffering, and death/near-death occurred nonetheless? I leave that up to each of you as you desire it.

In truth, John doesn’t notice the way his leg is bouncing until Mary’s hand settles on his knee, steadying the frantic motion.

“He’s late.”

“It’s _him_ ,” Mary counters, stroking the pad of her thumb along his thigh.

“He’s thirty _minutes_ late,” John glances at his mobile; frowns.

“He’s not answered?”

John shakes his head.

“Do you think he forgot?”

John snorts. “Probably deleted it,” he says, though he doesn’t quite believe it. They’d been talking about it for weeks now: dinner out for Valentine’s. Of course, they’d not told him what they’d planned to do _at_ dinner, but the significance of it even as just a way to celebrate together, celebrate a _romantic_ holiday about _love_ , had been well and truly emphasised. Repeatedly. 

Hell, they were at a _French_ restaurant. If that hadn’t made it clear that Sherlock’s presence was the whole fucking _point_ when they’d all but issued Sherlock his engraved invitation, nothing would have done it. 

“Anything exciting happen lately he may have wanted to make room for?”

Mary’s face scrunches a bit as she ponders. “The ultrasound?” 

“He built a new wing for information about the pregnancy,” John says, dismissing the possibility, and then they pause. They meet each other’s gaze.

They start giggling in perfect tandem.

God, but they _love_ that man.

“Oh, fuck,” John finally says as he calms, uses the insanely soft serviette to dab at his eyes.

“You check Baker Street, I’ll check the flat?” Mary says breathlessly, composing herself in kind.

“Mmmm, think they’ll box hors d'oeuvres?” John glances around at the absurdly posh establishment they’re currently occupying, and doubts it. He’s still getting sidelong glances for the laughter.

“Eh,” Mary shrugs. “I’m sure they’ll consider it with the proper incentive,” she grins, then, a tiny bit evil: “Drop Mycroft’s name, if nothing else works.”

“Ha,” John barks, deadpan, then sobers just a tad, because it’s _Sherlock_ , and he can handle himself, of course he can, but even he wouldn’t have missed a meal with them—at least, John didn’t _think_ he would—even if he had deleted everything to do with Valentine’s itself. “Let me know if you find him?”

“Of course,” Mary promises, shrugging into her coat. “I know it’s useless to say it, but don’t worry yet, yeah?” she smiles encouragingly at John as he hands her her bag. “It’s Sherlock, most likely he thought up a desperately engaging experiment on _E. coli_ that just couldn’t wait.”

John smiles, but it’s stretched quite thin. “Here’s hoping.”

“If they give you grief here, we’ll call Angelo,” Mary says, dealing in practicalities, and it does help to ground him; ground them both.

“Right,” John clears his throat; “right.”

“Kisses, darling,” Mary touches her lips and blows him love as she leaves, and John focuses on the menu, figuring what he could wheedle from the waitstaff quickest, versus what would survive the ride to Baker Street best.

He checks his wallet, and wonders how much he’ll have to tip at a Michelin starred restaurant to get something suitable for takeaway.  

____________________________________

It’s not as if Mary hadn’t known from the very start who Sherlock was, what he meant—continued to mean, even in death and would continue to mean, John had long since realised, for as long as John was blessed or doomed to draw breath. It’s not as if she’d walked blind into what they have, what they’ve built. 

The ghost of Sherlock Holmes, however, had long since started to shift from a ghost to something more inviting, something that embraced in the cold, and it’s for _that_ , above all else, that John may owe Mary the most.

But when the phantom embrace of Sherlock Holmes shifts to a solid body that lands hard, warm, that meets the rage of his hands with real resistance, bruises his knuckles on impact: when the ever-present twinge of memory transforms into a heaving chest and a bleeding nose, well.

John thought he’d been a mess, before—a mess on the mend, but a mess nonetheless.

He hasn’t got a fucking clue what he is, just now.

By the time they get home; by the time they finally slip into bed, John’s still wired, pulse wild, and his entire body is longing, wanting, to be so much closer to the piece of him that’s somehow crawled back from the great beyond and wants, it seems—wants to fit itself back into place.

He exhales shaky, as Mary settles down against his chest and curls in close.

“Oh,” she gasps a bit, surprise thick in her tone.

John frowns, but she only cuddles closer. “What?”

“It’s lovely,” she sighs, nuzzling at the skin between his nipples. 

He quirks his brow, and she looks up at him with a soft grin.

“Just this,” her palm flattens against the centre of his chest, and it saturates the frantic beat there, the pressure of her touch. 

“Your heart came back tonight,” she murmurs, and as she turns to kiss the pounding, he can feel the curve of her smile: “It’s brilliant.”

John exhales slow, and he can’t help—despite the tumult, despite the fury, despite the way his heart twists around the way it races for the _betrayal_ , as much as the _relief_ : John just can’t help the way his lips curl upward, the way his chest swell with something like joy because she’s right, Mary’s _right_.

There’s a whole half of his heart that found its way home tonight, and by _god_ , John knew he’d been empty, been broken: John had _known_ , and yet he’d never expected the difference to be so stark.

“I wasn’t lying,” Mary murmurs, muffled against his skin. “when I said I liked him.”

“I know you weren’t,” John says softly, kisses the top of her head.

“I know myself well enough, John,” Mary yawns, sleep making the words heavy, and perhaps more profound than they’re meant. “It wouldn’t take long before I loved him.”

Then again, perhaps not.

“If that’s something you want to think about,” Mary adds; “if that’s a road you want to walk.”

John wonders if she’s too far gone to the call of rest to notice the way his already-elevated heart rate kicks up a whole extra notch.

“Just know that it’s fine,” she breathes out, and he can feel the way she starts to sink into him, boneless. “It’s all fine, love,” she whispers, foggy, her lips wet as they drag lazy against his skin: “and it really would not take any time at all.”

John feels the world spin around him, feels his mind race now as swift as his heart.

He nearly misses Mary’s last sleepy sigh: 

“No time at all.”

____________________________________

“Let’s run away.”

Mary’s sprawled on the duvet when John enters, toothbrush still hanging from his mouth. It says something, he thinks, that he simply looks at her, reads her body—his soon-to-be wife’s body: the way she breathes—deep—and stares above her, lips parted just so.

He doesn’t ask what’s wrong. He walks back to the sink, rinses his mouth, and throws himself onto the bed next to her, watching the ceiling just the same.

“Where to?” he asks.

“Mali,” Mary sighs out, folds a hand to her stomach. “Oman, Djibouti.” She sucks in a long breath, and sighs it out once more. “Kuwait.”

John’s no detective; he’s not a genius. But he knows a thing or two, cobbled together across time and circumstance.

“Mary,” he whispers, and it sounds less wrung and more strained in his own self, in his own chest.

“Myanmar,” Mary continues, breathy; “Sri Lanka.”

“Mary,” John says again, because he knows. 

He knows what these places, these uncommon destinations offer as refuge to her mind as it races, as it works. 

“The Emirates.” Mary’s voice, on each syllable, grows a little bit lighter, a little more weak. 

John breathes out, slow, and props his arms beneath his head.

“Could always go back to Afghanistan,” John says, a dark laugh caught in his throat. “Probably have to convert, regardless.”

Polygamous unions are largely religiously-sanctioned practices in most of those countries, after all. 

John doesn’t feel the thump of his pulse so much as the uncanny race of his blood as he ponders what his life has become—how light his heart feels to even consider the _possibility_.

 _Jesus_.

“Also fairly sure it’s more a multiple wives thing, rather than multiple husbands,” John adds, idly, “but don’t quote me.”

Mary huffs at him, weakly. “You’d look gorgeous in a dress, darling.”

John grins, halfhearted. “Sherlock’s got better legs for it.”

They both sigh, and grow silent.

“He’s,” Mary starts softly: “he’s...” She trails, frowns, and he watches in his peripheral vision the way her fingers clench and relax, rhythmic as she breathes. “Do you—”

“Yes,” John answers the questions he knows she won’t be able to put into words. “He’s,” and it’s John, now, who finds it difficult, who feels the air in his lungs grow muddled; thin. 

“He’s something else, isn’t he?”

Mary’s lips quirk upward now, and he can see her eyes flutter closed as she exhales long, deep until there’s nothing left, cheeks flushed, and John knows that look.

It’s how she looks after sex. 

John grins, and exhales long and slow himself, pulse still just a touch too strong.

Sherlock Holmes does indeed have that effect on people.

“How did you manage, before?” Mary asks him, incredulous. “How did you manage _after_...”

John’s breath catches, and he hears the still of Mary’s own respiration on the inhale: it’s a sore subject. It had never stopped sticking in John’s chest like a blade. 

John’s not sure it ever will, even now.

“I told myself it was enough just to see him every morning, to watch him every night,” John tells her. “And after, I...”

John swallows, and feels Mary’s hand wrap around his own: squeezing, but asking nothing in return. He’s grateful, for that.

She knows, after all. She’s the one who found him. After.

“He’s,” John tries, shakes his head. “He is,” and he licks his lips, tries to buy himself time in a rush that’s unmerited, that he can’t quite control. 

“He is a force of nature,” John says, and he cannot help the smile that tugs on his lips, even as the hard knock of adrenaline, of deep feeling in his veins thumps at the base of his throat. “He is magnetic and he fills you, he fills you more than you can hold, more than you can...”

“He really does,” Mary whispers, marvelling. “My god, John,” she laughs, breathless: “I mean, you’d said, but he...”

“He’s more than words,” John agrees. “He’s just,” and John’s mouth is dry, his face warm as he confesses it, gives life and voice to the simple truth: “ _More_.”

They’re silent, for a while, and John follows the pump of his heart, roots himself against the warmth of Mary’s hand around his own.

“I love him,” Mary says, swift and hardly there, but it explodes in John’s chest, atomic. 

“I love him like I love you,” she murmurs, stares wide at the stucco overhead. “When I look at him, it feels the same,” she inhales sharp, and her head lolls to the side, her eyes finding his as she breathes: 

“It feels the same as when I’m looking at you.”

The way John’s chest clenches, the way his heart skips and then surges mad, is nearly painful, but he barely feels it. Because of course they’ve spoken of this, the possibility of it—the possibility _in_ it, but John had never dared to hope, because hope was dangerous, hope was ravenous, hope had destroyed him one too many times; has made him ache too hard, too deep to notice that for as much as it’s wrung him, it’s never failed him.

_Please, God, let me live._

_Please, just stop this, stop being dead._

_God, make it stop, because I love him, I love them, and it hurts._

He shouldn’t have doubted.

He turns on his side and pauses, just a moment, before he moves in the blink of an eye, straddling his fiancée and leaning, pressing his lips to hers with a fervour, with a beat that resonates through him and demands to be felt beyond the limits of his own body.

“You’re amazing,” he gasps, because she is, she _is_ : “You, you’re...” he nips her lip, licks insides, devours, because she’s offering him a miracle—she’s giving him the opportunity to have and to hold _both_ of the miracles he’s got in his life; she’s giving him his _life_ , unfractured, unseparated: whole. 

“God,” John nearly sobs into her mouth, his chest lowered against her own as the surge of radiance disburses and tingles through his limbs, leaves him limp and warm and full: “ _Thank you_.” 

“I wasn’t ever going to take him from you, John,” she cups his cheek, stares truly into his eyes, soft and honest and open, _loving_ : “But the question now, can you share him?” Her hands reaches to the centre of his chest: “Can you share your heart?”

He shudders, closes his eyes. “You’re my heart, too,” he covers her hand. “You know that, don’t you?”

She smiles, and tilts her head to kiss him, slow and telling.

“It’s all I’ve wanted,” John gasps out, shaky, once they break away. “All I ever wanted,” he rubs against her knuckles, rhythmic, as his heart stutters, cadence wholly lacking. 

“Both,” he exhales, strained and spent: “And it killed me, it was killing me, I—”

“Never again, my love,” Mary promises, solemn and sure. “Not ever again will this heart of yours,” her hand stretches over his skin, against the rattling there, the beat that’s not a beat: “Never again will the way you love have reason to cause you pain.”

John huffs a low breath, his whole body taking on a terrible tightness, a hateful despair.

“Mary,” he chokes; “Mary, I’ve never said it, I’ve never told him—”

“God, John,” Mary smiles, sad. “If he doesn’t know—”

“He’s married to his work,” John whispers, wretched, but Mary’s hand turns in his own, laces with his fingers and squeezes now, hard. 

“Do you not see how he looks at you?” she asks him, eyes imploring him to _observe_ , and that look makes him feel restless, weightless, faint.

Her gaze softens, when she sees him piece together the disparate bits that were never so far, so difficult to place, and for a moment, they breathe; they just breathe, until John’s heart fills against with the first tendrils of what could be, what _might_.

“I’m,” Mary breaks the still, after a time. “I’m more worried about me, really.”

And John, who’s in the business of observing for the moment, at least, sees the truth in her face, the set of her mouth: she _is_ worried. She fears she’s not enough.

He knows the feeling, and yet.

“Do you not see the way he looks at _you_?” he asks her, a subtle grin pulling at his lips as he throws her words right back with no less feeling than he caught them at the first.

It startles a laugh from her, and it feels lovely, that laugh against his chest from beneath, a bubbling heat that warms him straight through as she murmurs: “Touché.” 

“Slowly, then,” John says finally, half-resigned, half-wistful, wholly overcome and yet that’s allowed, now, isn’t it? 

He’s _allowed_ to think of wholes, now, and isn’t that _gorgeous_?

“Slowly, with him,” John breathes, careful: “Just to be safe.” 

“Mmm,” Mary hums, stretching as John moves, settles at her side; she turns to watch him, to keep his eyes on hers. “And the wedding?”

It’s not a push, or a demand. She’s just as conflicted as he is, and it shouldn’t feel good, it shouldn’t feel reassuring.

It shouldn’t.

His life, however, has been made of shouldn’ts for so long, he thinks maybe his capacity for evaluating such things might be utterly fucked.

“Djibouti’s not the greatest this time of year,” he sighs, resigned, uncertain. 

If he could walk them both to the altar, he’d do it. God, he’d do it in a heartbeat.

And his heart’s still pumping inordinately fast.

The way Mary deflates, visibly, at what he says, what he implies: it tempts him to call Mycroft Holmes that instant, tempts him to push the envelope and _demand_ a _way_.

“Look at me,” John coaxes her. “If,” he shakes his head, bites his lip and brings her hand to his mouth. He means to say things, explain things, make it clear that the wedding’s a formality, no matter _what_ , but all the words die in his throat.

Mary saves him, which isn’t new at all.

“Have you asked him yet?”

John frowns. “I’ve been,” he hedges; “working up to it.”

Mary sighs. “John...”

“Do you have any idea how difficult it is, not making it into an entirely different question?” John bites out between clenched teeth, because it _is_ difficult, god, it’s difficult just _thinking_ about it. “How hard it’s going to be not to let him know exactly why I want him to stand with me? Because it’s the,” John swallows, and there’s a burning behind his eyes that feels treacherous indeed: “the closest I’m,” his eyes dart to Mary apologetically: “that _we’re_ , going to get?”

John closes his eyes, takes a few steadying breaths, shallower than they ought to be if they’re to have any real effect.

“How do you know?”

John’s eyes snap open and he stares openly at Mary, uncomprehending.

“What?”

She stares right back at him, undaunted, and truly: he loves that about her. “How do you know it’s the closest?”

John makes to protest, makes to point out all the reasons _why_ , expect in that moment, that very moment, hope decides to flicker desperate in the very centre of his chest, all pain and joy, and his breath halts hard beneath his ribs, stops him still.

Hope wrings him first, he tells himself.

“Slowly, John,” Mary says softly: “You’re a soldier,” and it’s a call to action, it’s a reminder, a bolster for them both. “You know what it means to play the long game for a worthy cause.”

And John does. He does.

He didn’t realise how quick his breath was coming, until Mary clasps their hands between their bodies and his chest stop heaving, just a bit.

“I don’t know if there’s ever been a cause more worthy than him,” Mary whispers, earnest. Decided. 

Unwavering.

_Hope wrings him first._

“No,” John breathes back, and there’s a warmth in his chest again, there’s a burning that feels _right_. “No, I don’t, either.”

Wrings first, but never fails.

They both drift off to sleep, soft.

Hopeful, even.

____________________________________

The wedding itself is beautiful. Exciting. Exhilerating.

Sherlock barely leaves their sight. Thank god.

And there’s a dark bit of Mary’s soul that she’s long stopped denying; a shadowy sliver that aches, just a bit, for Sherlock to speak about _her_ with as much devotion as he gives to John—of course there is. She’s human.

But watching him: watching the way he offers, the way he stretches to _give_ : it’s exquisite, and if she reaches more often for John’s hands than is necessary to squeeze, to steady, to hold, then it’s unsurprising, really.

He’s showing them. He’s showing them that slow is working. He’s promising them forever. He’s giving them vows Mary knows, _knows_ they’re both thrumming with the desire to return with all of the strength and love and feeling the world can hold, she _knows_ it.

But slow.

Slow, with him. This is still so new.

If she reaches for John’s hands twice as often as she needs, and if he reaches back and it feels different, somehow, impossible: if they both know they’re reaching because they can’t touch _him_ , just then, as they wish, they’re in this together; their hearts share common entanglements.

Mary doesn’t know what she’s ever done to get so lucky.

When he plays for them, Mary presses fully into John’s warmth, closes her eyes, and she sways, imagines heat behind her, pressed against her back and arms around her: caring, loving, holding, _wanting_ —surgeon’s hands in her own.

Violinist’s hands wrapped tight about her.

Perfect.

The pattern of John’s breathing tells her, undefinable but _certain_ , that he’s thinking the very same thing.

When Sherlock slips, when he says what he does, Mary’s heart pounds heavy, hard, and John’s joyous laughter mingles with Sherlock and she thinks—she is blessed with a long stretch of moments where she can relish the idea of this, of three whole selves and more love than she can rightly stand swaddling this new precious life, raising the most glorious of new souls into the world for how much it is cherished, for how much care and affection and sheer _adoration_ bubbles between the three of them, uninhibited in this moment, suspended here, and pure.

It doesn’t last. She suspects something that strong is a flickering thing by default, but it still sinks heavy in her, when it starts to give way.

Sherlock’s features take on a coolness, a sadness, and it catches in her throat as John grins, moves to dance with her, and it’s cold and sad in Mary’s chest for an instant before Sherlock gives his blessing as they move to dance.

When she mouths to him, _For you_ , it’s not just John’s arms upon her that she means.

It’s her arms upon John. It’s the fact that they’re both spending every other step imagining his lithe frame, his warm scent, his heat wrapped close against them.

He’s so clever, he sees everything. She thinks he has to understand.

She sinks into John, then, and whispers: “Can you imagine, John? A baby loved from three sides, rather than two?”

John smiles against her cheek. “By parents who are loved from two sides rather than one, themselves?”

The warmth bubbles again in her, effervescent, and she giggles, joyous, and lets herself imagine what it will look like, what this slow build could make, what heights they can _reach_.

God, but it’s _beautiful_ , and her heart feels so much more full than she could ever possibly hold. She needs more _hands_ to hold it, and she realises, with utter wonder, that she’ll have them. 

She’ll have them.

The joy of it propels her for long moments; suspends her until finally they break, seek champagne—just a sip for Mary, now that they know what they know; look for Sherlock, propose a private toast for them, just for them.

Mary could swear her heart stops, just for a moment, when the look but cannot find him.

“Probably turned in,” John tries to reassure them both, but they both know it’s a hollow attempt: this is Sherlock.

 _Sleep_. Jesus. 

They’ve both learned to act, though, and act well, so they smile as they ought while they wait the agonising minutes before Sherlock returns their text:

_Urgent call from NSY, consultation needed. Apologies. Enjoy the rest of your reception. -S_

Mary frowns, while John’s lips stretch thin; she tries to latch to that new shift in their correspondence, just _-S_. She tries to convince herself it’s not mere wishful thinking to say that it’s telling; to say that it’s intimate.

She knows it’s wishful thinking to say that it’s the equivalent of _Love, Sherlock_ as her chest aches fierce for it to be, but she doesn’t care. She thinks it anyway.

They both know it’s a blatant lie, of course, a thin excuse; they don’t even bother to ask Greg to confirm.

They push through the rest of the reception, because the obligation feels heavy in both their stomachs, settles harsh at the base of their spines: they swallow hard, they grin where they should, and they dance, but they don’t love it.

Not like _he_ loves it.

Mary and John retire to the hotel amidst cheers, well-wishes, and a few playful whistles; they smile, but when they close the door, when they fall into bed, they’re both quiet: they both stare into the dark.

Sherlock hadn’t understood. The man who sees _everything_ hadn’t seen _this_.

Mary fights a sudden surge of despair and the way that it burns against her eyelids by burying her head in John’s chest, who wraps arms around her and holds her close.

“I don’t want to leave,” she whispers, and pretends she’s not trembling. “I don’t want to take a holiday from,” her voice catches, dry and rough inside her throat: “From half of me. Of _us_.”

She hears some of the anxiety as it bleeds out from the pulse of John’s heart beneath her, and she exhales long, slow, because they’re on the same page.

They’re on the same page.

“We’ll go to Baker Street first thing,” John whispers, and she’s able to sleep, then. They both are.

Come morning, they meet Sherlock’s deception from the night prior with a white lie of their own: they tell him that the cruise line they’d booked with had a recent history of food contamination—with the baby, now, they’d not wanted to take a chance. Sherlock quirks a brow at them but says nothing, asks if they’d like to hear the compositions that hadn’t quite made the cut for their waltz, and immediately, within an _instant_ , the world feels right again.

They’d got near a month of leave for their travels—Mycroft’s gift, as it was—and they spend it to the fullest, exploring something infinitely better than the world at large, something closer to home and closer to both their hearts than any sights or sprawling seas. 

They both ask him for a dance. The blank look he starts with is heartbreaking, but once he recovers, the smile he gives them is so earth-shattering that they make it a habit. They dance every night. 

“It was better,” John says, when they settle into bed that night; “It was so much better.” Mary nods, knows exactly what he means.

_It was better like this than just the two of us at the wedding. It was so much better than imagining him there._

They start in John’s room, sleeping, staying. Sherlock crashes on the sofa after a short case—he’s only taking short cases, ones safe enough to not pose a threat to Mary in her condition, which irks and endears in equal shares, but he brings them both with him, keeps them close; but Sherlock’s snuffling in a deep, restorative sleep one night and John watches, mesmerised, and the way his eyes shine and his lips curve when Mary settles around Sherlock’s sprawled body to sleep herself is something that means more than words can hold.

Sherlock sleeps with them, after. Just sleeps.

It’s awkward, and endearing, and wonderful when Sherlock settles their weary selves after a long day of clue-scouring into _his_ bed—it’s beautiful, it swells hot and incredible in both their chests when they moan as one and reach, drag Sherlock down between them: as he wraps an arm around them, as the tension, the hesitance in him ebbs in slow drops, and he finally drops a kiss to each of their brows before his arms tighten, drawing them close, and they sleep. 

Sherlock cooks for them, once. Breakfast. It tastes good, but it’s nothing special, it’s not gourmet: it’s so delightfully ordinary, so blissfully mediocre that Mary nearly sobs for the truth of it.

Sherlock leaves a change of clothes in the spare room of John and Mary’s flat after the first night they spend there, even if he never sleeps in the guest bed. He has a toothbrush there, too, but not in the guest bath—in the master, instead, rattling around next to Mary’s and John’s, and it’s perfect. 

God, but it’s _perfect_.

It’s never clear, whether Sherlock ever tried to confirm their story about the food poisoning rerouting their honeymoon. In the end, it doesn’t matter. Mary can’t imagine a better way to have celebrated this new chapter, this new step in her life, _their_ lives, than laying this foundation, cementing what they are, what they can and _will be_ , she knows it. 

She knows it in the way it feels so warm, so sweet through her whole body, falling in love but doubled: being in love but wrapped in it twice. She knows it in the way she wakes upon strong chests and can tell who’s beneath her by the cadence of a pulse and the smoothness of their skin. She knows it.

And Mary believes, truly, that by the end of that first month of married life—married by law, and married further still by the beating of her heart and the growing heart in her womb—Sherlock gets it. Sherlock understands. He is theirs.

And they are _his_.

Wholeheartedly. 

____________________________________

It’s Sherlock, shockingly, who makes the first move. 

Except that it’s not shocking, not really, and it’s not even the first move. Sherlock is passion and intensity and above all—not just behind his masks and defences but _in_ them, woven and infused in every piece and part—Sherlock is _feeling_ , strong and bold and true, devastating and perfect and an honour to behold let alone be held _within_ , and they’ve been building to this. 

They’ve been building to _this_.

Sherlock licks against the cleft of her, and she shivers with the way his lips catch and then meet, kiss against the very juncture of the slit, breathing hard against her, chest heaving up against the insides of her thighs. He lifts his head, watches her as he kisses her stomach, and his eyes speak that this is deeper, that he’s kissing her and something sweeter, something more, and the sensation of Sherlock’s mouth on her still-flat stomach is profound, impossible.

He shudders, suddenly, and his eyes flutter closed, and Mary melts when Sherlock whimpers, bucks against the way John fits his mouth around him, sucking at his length as John traces up Mary’s legs, and Sherlock’s mouth is slack against Mary’s hips, against her mons as he drags down, as his tongue licks slopping against her, teasing haphazardly against her clit in a way that is stunningly overwhelming for its unpredictable rhythm, its inhibition: she clenches and writhes, and when Sherlock comes hard, the way he pants, open-mouthed against the unbearable wetness of her is a dream and a torment.

By the time John slides up next to her, capturing her lips with Sherlock’s seed still hot on his tongue, Sherlock is fumbling for John’s straining prick and palming the swell of him as he mouths along Mary’s trembling flesh and then reverses, fingers between the hot folds of her as his tongue laps slickness from John’s tip: oh.

 _Oh_.

They neither of them last long, and Sherlock is a marvel, a natural: they’ve never asked what he knows and what he doesn’t, what he’s tried and what he hasn’t, but fuck if it matters, fuck if it’s ever mattered, because he is as eager as they are, and he is _amazing_ beyond measure as he licks her through her climax, and still somehow milks John straight through as he comes, easing him back to softness with a focused tenderness that catches in Mary’s chest as she watches, dazed—that trills madly as his gaze flicks back to her as he watches her through heavy lashes and licks wantonly at the flesh of her, his lips red and glistening as he pulls away, watching them both.

It’s instinctive, to reach for him, and John only just beats her to kissing that beautiful bastard—she settles for pressing her lips to the base of his neck, the heavy pumping of his blood there as she catches her breath, as they all go effortlessly boneless and breathless and full: sated and wrapped in one another.

Wholly held.

They wake, tucked and warm and one body short, but Mary doesn’t fret, not when she can hear the soft clang of pots and pans, not when John inhales deep and smiles at the scent of seasonings and the gentle sound of frying eggs.

He curls into her and doesn’t bother stifling a yawn. She sighs, and it is a beautiful thing: there’s not an ounce of tension in her.

“We can never lose him,” Mary says it before she can think of speaking: it’s the heart of her that holds that need, that forms those words.

John stares at her, makes a vow that Mary thinks might be deeper, might be stronger than the ones he made until death did they part: “Not _ever_.”

Mary smiles, kisses John’s nose until he grins in kind, and levers herself to sitting, to standing, to greeting her other-other half with lazy arms around his waist and sleepy lips against his neck and a heart full of impossible things.

John stretches, slow and long, and follows with the same goals in mind.

____________________________________

 

Mary lights up as soon as she walks in the door, as soon as she spots them on the tabletop. 

“John!”

He’s settled in his chair with his laptop, pecking at the blog, when he looks up.

“You found them!” she damn well squeals, holding up the chain both her (admittedly false) American dog tags had been strung to, now clanging with a single of her oblong tags and another, more circular cut of metal.

“Sock drawer,” John grins sheepishly. “Balled up in an old dress pair.”

Mary laughs, because as soon as they’d decided to do this, to really _do this_ , long-overdue as it was, she’d been adamant about them both offering a token. She’d held on to the first pair of tags she’d ever got for a covert mission, and she’d taken to heart both the practical and sentimental use of them: when she’d conceded the traditional route to John, and proposed giving Sherlock both their I.D. tags as a complement to spoken vows, she’d been utterly scandalised that he hadn’t the foggiest where they’d ended up.

“I’ve not got _rid_ of them, Mary, I just don’t keep tabs on the bloody things!” he’d protested, but to no real end. She’d been insistent.

“ _Find them_ , John Watson!” she’d commanded, brooking no argument. “It’s _significant_. They’re _symbolic_. Find them.”

It had taken him a good two weeks to manage it, and more stress on Mary than she’s willing to admit—because this has to be perfect, she wants it to be _perfect_ , he _deserves_ perfect—but John earns a long, fervent kiss for his efforts.

“You’re lucky you didn’t toss them,” she laughs into his mouth, and he grins before his eyes trail to the bag still clutched in her hand.

“Did you pick it up?” he asks, equal parts nervous and excited.

She smiles broadly at him, digging out the contents. “Just here.”

She hands him the velvet box, and his hands only tremble the very slightest bit as he creaks it open, as fingers the band inside— _his_ token to give—and lifts it to his face, studies the inscription and swallows around the sudden tightness in his throat as he fingers the lines of the words carved sharp and curling: perfect.

It’s _perfect_.

Mary sits on the arm of his chair and puts her arm around him.

“Are you ready?” she murmurs into his ear, kisses the side of his head.

“More than,” John breathes, still staring at the ring, before he takes a shuddering breath: “God, what if he,” John falters, then: “What if...”

Mary cups her palm against his cheek and turns him to face her.

“Months, John,” she tells him, firm but certain with it; sure. “These have been the best months of my life,” she tells him, wide-eyed and devastatingly honest as she asks him: “Haven’t they been yours?”

John doesn’t hesitate at all.

“God, yes,” he tells her, breathless and entirely consumed with that truth, if only for the moment: “No,” he stutters a bit, but follows through: “No question at all.”

“Do you think he’d suffer mediocrity just for show?” Mary asks him, pushes him to think it through more with logic, less with the pressure in his chest that Mary knows, that Mary feels just as keen. “He’s with us nearly always, we spend our nights together in one place or another far more often than not.” She tucks John’s head against the crook of her neck and kisses his temple. 

“We’re neither of us idiots, and anything truly skilled we’ve learned in the art of observation, we’ve learned from _him_ ,” she says in earnest. “We _can’t_ have misread so many signs, it’s just...” She sighs. “It’s not _possible_.”

And she waits, she waits to see how John responds, because if he can believe it, so can she.

So can _she_.

“He loves us,” Mary says, with as much faith as she can muster, with as much of the lightness in her chest that Sherlock smile makes her feel.

“He’s never said,” John protests weakly, full of nerves, and Mary holds him closer. “When we’ve said it, he doesn’t—”

“His eyes say it,” Mary cuts him off forcefully, fervently: “Don’t you think they say it better than the words?”

And they breathe, then, together: they breathe, and think of those eyes, and Mary traces the embossed letters on the metal shapes her her hand just as John strokes the line of the ring box in his hand, back and forth.

Back and forth.

“Slow,” she whispers, finally. “Even with this, even taking this step, he still needs slow.” She pulls back and looks at John, smiles at him, and smoothes a hand down his chest as she murmurs, deep and low:

“That doesn’t mean his heart’s not as full of this as yours,” she tells him, and then takes his hand in hers, kisses his fingertips before holding his palm to her chest in turn: “As mine.” 

John looks at her, his breaths even, and he smiles, just slightly, just so.

He nods. They’re ready.

More than.

____________________________________

Mary unlocks the flat, calling out as soon as the door’s half opened.

“Sherlock?” The fact that there are no lights on isn’t telling, not with him, but the fact that there’s no sound makes her heart sink a bit. She flips the switch, and looks around.

No sign.

Save for two envelopes on the kitchen table she _knew_ she’d cleared before they’d left.

She walks to them, reads the familiar scrawl across each: one salmon, one silver.

Her breath catches as she slides a finger—just barely steady—beneath the seal of the pinkish one addressed to her.

It’s not until she’s read it through—once, then twice—and she’s out the door again, clutching both cards against her and hailing a cab against the bite of the evening wind that she realises it, that she notices.

She hands are shaking, and there are tears on her face.

“Baker Street,” she tells the driver, and for all that her eyes won’t stop steaming, she laughs into her hand, shakes with emotion and all the wonder in the world because god, _god_.

That brilliant, perfect _idiot_.

She chokes between a laugh and a sob before she manages to add to the man behind the wheel: 

“Quick as you can.”


	3. Part Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Continued love to [snogandagrope](http://archiveofourown.org/users/snogandagrope) and [speakmefair](http://archiveofourown.org/users/speakmefair). And to everyone who's been reading and commenting and being stellar, of course <3

If Sherlock’s hands shake as he undoes the lock, there’s no one there to notice.

If Sherlock can’t remember climbing the stairs back to the flat, hands empty now—the deed done, the evidence relinquished, his heart laid bare—then it is irrelevant. 

If Sherlock wears his coat into his room because he was lucky, this night: he was lucky because the coat smell faintly of the chair, of John and of Mary—if he drapes the coat across his chest as he stretches upon the bed, that is his prerogative, that is his _right_.

If the weight of it makes the unbearable thrum of his heart in his chest all the more prevalent, all the more pronounced as he does his utmost to sink into his Mind Palace and _breathe_ , god _damnit_ , well: it’s a price he has to pay.

He folds his hands beneath his chin, closes his eyes.

 _Breathe_.  
_______________________________

The energy that sings in her is both an exultation and a lament: her heart is sore for feeling as she curses traffic, as she reads the card in her hands again and again, and she is not the sort of woman who sobs at romanticism; she is not the type to be so moved by simple words, except...

  


She wants to blame the tear-stains on the hormones, except she can’t. 

She just _can’t_.

And she wants only to relish this, rejoice in it: Sherlock Holmes, in love with _her_ , in all the ways she’d dreamed of and infinitely more—except he’d left these confessions in the dark, in the cold, when what he should have been doing was sitting in warmth and comfort, enjoying fine wine and excellent cuisine with her and John before Mary gave him the soul of them both, and John gave him their promise of forever.

And the fact that he hadn’t, that he _wasn’t_ : she fears, without knowing, that she—that _they_ , she _and_ John—have somehow failed this man they so love.

She sighs, chest hollowed at the thought, and reads the card again, the words Sherlock penned to her and her alone, because it will fill her: it will fill her more than she can hold and it will sustain her until this bloody cab gets where it needs to and she can make things _right_.

_My Mary,_

_I had thought, for a moment, to address this to your given name, because the day you entrusted me with the story of your past, with the needs of your present and the fear in you: the day you bared that burden was, perhaps selfishly, a day I shall never forget. Holding you to me, feeling that you trusted me enough to not merely share yourself, but to ask my help, when you— you—are perhaps the strongest of us all: I knew what the word meant, but I don’t know that I’d never experienced what it meant to be humbled before that moment. _

_And so, I thought to call you by that name from your birth, but upon reflection, I thought: no. The self you have shown me, have offered me to hold is not a name, or a face, but a presence, a fire in me that roars just as perfect as it smoulders soft, and you are Mary._

_I hope that you will not think it less-than-good, that I have called you mine._

_I assure you that I do not do so emptily, or without reciprocity. I have called John my Alpha Ursae Minoris; he mocked me, once, for my lack of knowledge regarding astronomy, and in making to rectify that dearth, I knew he was my guide, my home._

_The truth, however, is that Polaris is a multiple star. My guide is more than singular; my home, it seems, was meant to reside in more than one place._

_You, my Mary, my Lodestar: I confess that, in the first moments of our acquaintance, I wished to loathe you, but even then I could not manage. I admit that, for the span of a few breaths, I did fear you—I feared that you had claimed the heart of me, had stolen from me that vital thing I held most dear before I could make it known, before I could hold him close as I ached to._

_I feared you’d rightly claimed what I’d left behind. I feared you held my heart and I would never know it again—and having spent so long without an inkling of its worth, to lose it so soon, when it was so battered and swollen, tender for the way I’d thrown it to the wolves and cared little for its wellbeing, save its ultimate survival: in seeing you, and fearing that, I admit I was undone._

_I realised, however, and none too soon, that I’d been right, only in all the wrong ways._

_You held my heart, true, but not in John; you held me between your palms, Mary. I shivered there, and you were merciful, you were beautiful, you were giving. You cradled that mess of me and clutched me to your chest and let me breathe, let me know warmth, and I did not deserve it. I do not._

_It took so very little, Mary, once I knew that I could love. It took so very little for me to fall for you entire._

_The truth is, once I ceased fearing what you had not taken, I recognised in you a likeness, something mutual about our natures. You were more than you seemed and less than you feared: you played your cards close, and I took to you immediately. Admittedly, I’d been primed well enough by your husband—tempered, eased of my sharpest edges—but you must know that I am not the sort to gravitate to others, automatically or otherwise._

_I had every reason to detest you at worst, tolerate you at best, and yet within an evening you’d promised to talk-around the heart of me—for I know that you recognised what he meant to me, I know that you were well aware and still you smiled my way and swore to convince him; within a single night, you’d captivated my mind._

_There is only one other, who’s managed that feat. He sleeps beside you most nights; between us, others—sometimes, he grasps your hand across my hips as I watch your face in the dark._

_It broke me, at times, to help plan your wedding—I tell you this, not in order to engender guilt, but to underscore the degree to which I was then and remain now to an ever-increasing degree drawn to your company. Being privy to your wit is an experience I cannot properly detail in words: it spurs joy from the deepest recesses of my chest, and it feels warm for reasons I cannot parse. You are a woman of clean lines and fine points, and the dark parts of you were a thing I respected—the way you bore them as pieces of wholes, rather than blemishes, rather than something to despise; I admired that, in you._

_The day you sobbed against me, and told me everything: the day you trusted me with not merely the heart of you, but the soul, and more: more than that, you trusted me to help you slay your demons._

_More still, you trusted me to help you give John the gift of all you’d kept at bay, to tell him all the things you’d shrouded, the secrets he knew were there yet never sought to unearth._

_You may not realise, but in asking of me, you gave so much more: you gave trust, you gave faith, you showed a confidence not in my abilities and skills but in the heart of me, and to this very moment, Mary: to this moment, when I bring to the fore that feeling, when I relive in the long halls of my Mind, I can barely keep from trembling, for you gave me insight, you gave me freedom, you gave me a point of reference from which to hearken back: to know that selflessness is not a thing to be suffered, but a warmth, when it’s given right. I can never thank you sufficiently for that, but I _can_ love you, I can cherish you, I can tell you what you are and what you mean._

_Because you, my darling, are a privilege to breathe against in the night._

_I had been told, more than once, that marriage changes people. I feared that to reference only the worst, and yet, again: I should have known better. I have changed drastically, myself, and the pain of it has done nothing to even begin to outweigh the resultant thrill, however long it was in coming._

_And the truth is I never had to cross-reference any articles or reports: there were no cases of food poisoning on that cruise line, Mary. Not a single one._

_Another thing I cannot thank you for enough._

_You’ve often come awake to my eyes studying John—you smile, and it is always genuine happiness in your gaze, but what a sleeping woman cannot know is the way my eyes trace her lips, and watch rise of her chest; the way my fingers brush light against her skin, sleep-warm and smooth. The way her lips quirk, perhaps in dreams, or perhaps because she feels the feather-touch of my lips against her body and knows, knows how dear she is, how much she is loved in her own right as much as as a part of something even I cannot fathom as real for the way that it lives and breathes, for the way that we move and are: perfect complements that defy reason._

_You are exquisite, Mary, in the first light of dawn._

_You are exquisite in every light, as you are within its lack._

_I must emphasise that, while your condition is by no means a prerequisite for my affections, the way that you have welcomed my attentions to the child you carry is an honour beyond measure. I had never thought myself the sort to take any interest in such things—rather the opposite, in fact. But I am taken, utterly: in this, I cannot even pretend to deny how my heart feels as if it swells to bursting when you hold my hand to your middle and allow me to feel her; when you speak of her future, not with two parents but with three; when you tell me I’ll teach her the periodic table, when you say I’ll have to think on what I want for her to call me, when you postulate that I will be her favourite, that she’ll love me, as if it is a given, as if it is fact—you must understand that the very notion that anyone would invite me to share in this had never occurred to me, still seems unreal. But that you, Mary, that you and John are here, that you are with me, that you have expressed to me love and acceptance and desire—that you are at the very least implying that the future you envision involves me in even the slightest capacity, that I remain, that I am a part of you now and that I will continue to be—Mary._

_Mary, you cannot imagine the way my heart sings._

_And so, as I vowed to you once, I vow again: always, Mary Elizabeth. The heart I never thought to have, larger now—fuller, stronger, and fierce for the way that it hums—belongs to the three of you._

_Unequivocally._

_Yours,  
SH_

_That you are at the very least implying that the future you envision involves me in even the slightest capacity_ catches her eye, again and again, and she nearly chokes on it as she clutches the cardstock like a lifeline, stares out the window and breathes:

“Not implying, Sherlock. Demanding. _Pleading_.” Her voice catches.

“In _every_ capacity, you goddamned fool.”  
_______________________________

The flat feels empty when John gets there—a fact that settles heavier in his chest than it should.

Sherlock’s coat’s gone, which speaks to the absence of the man himself, and that leaves a sour taste in John’s mouth because it means one of two things: Sherlock forgot about dinner, or Sherlock’s in trouble.

Both of those possibilities stick like lead, skip in the rhythm of John’s pulse: painful.

He’s not the best friend, the lover, the _partner_ of the world’s only consulting detective for nothing, though, so he pokes around, looks for any indication of where Sherlock’s got to.

The flat itself doesn’t look suspicious: samples on the countertops, used slides scattered every which way, something foul-scented on the table in the kitchen that John wouldn’t be surprised to find is acid of a sort, and glitter sprinkled about—

Wait.

Glitter?

John looks closer and yeah, that’s what it is, and it’s only by chance, by sheer luck that he catches the otherwise-empty bin nearby that boasts a single item tossed away—a card.

A Valentine’s card, from the look of it.

He fishes it out and handles it carefully, eyes narrowed as he reads the front:

  


And that’s Sherlock’s handwriting, alright.

John’s chest feels suddenly warm, and too tight.

He opens the card, and keeps reading. 

  
  


John laughs at that, soft and a little bit wet in the back of his throat for the sting in his eyes, because—damnit, damn it _all_ , he is so in love with this man.

  


John bites back a downright cackle at the mental image of Anderson composing greeting cards in his downtime.

John’s own heart trips as he thinks about all the times Sherlock’s has danced with destruction—he squeezes his eyes shut tight at the thought and pushes it aside as best he can: it doesn’t matter how much time passes, how many nights are spent with Sherlock heat beside him; it hurts, it will always hurt. If anything, really, it only gets worse, because as the warmth of Sherlock’s presence and the ache in John’s own chest for him becomes ever-more familiar, deepens with every passing day, the idea of losing him, of being without him for more than hours at a time: it’s unfathomable. 

John swallows hards, and continues reading.

  


John’s breath, by the time he’s done reading, is coming shallow and quick, because the pieces are there—beautiful pieces, pieces that speak to the world and infinity and all the things John Watson aches for and doesn’t rightly deserve—but he doesn’t like how they’re coming together: love, discarded; intention, abandoned. 

Sherlock is his _heart_ , and John doesn’t much care for the idea that his heart seems not to know its place; seems not to comprehend its worth.

John’s glad, then, for the clamour that the door makes downstairs. He turns, and his heart leaps, races until he realises that the footsteps aren’t Sherlock’s.

Mary’s face, when she throws open the door to the flat, is wild, her eyes darting around the room though she’s seen John: she didn’t find Sherlock either, and fuck, just— _fuck_.

“Where is he?” she asks needlessly, and John notices she’s holding envelopes; notices her eyes are rimmed in red, and John doesn’t know what it is that causes the fear in his chest, just that whatever breeds it is a terrible thing.  
_______________________________

His face is buried in Redbeard’s fur when he registers the slamming of the door.

And it’s the slamming of the door that underscores the noises he’d been filtering out: unthreatening, like a heartbeat, so well know—footsteps, breathing, quiet laughter.

John.

Sherlock shakes himself from his thoughts, bids the image of his childhood companion goodbye as he sits up, sets the coat draped over him aside and rises to his feet with a warm hum fluttering through his veins: he hears Mary, now, knows the footfalls that are tramping up the stairs, and oh: they’ve come to see him. They’ve finished their romantic dinner together, their couple’s time alone, and thought to see _him_ before the end of their night.

He bites his lip against the force of the smile that wants to curl across his mouth at the thought that maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t a risk to write those cards, to tell them what was in his heart.

“Where is he?” Mary asks just as he exits his room, and Sherlock’s grin no longer requires reining as it warps into a frown at the weight, the shrill edge of her voice. Perhaps something’s gone wrong, one of them is hurt, in danger, something dreadful has—

“Just here,” Sherlock interjects, schools himself as best he can so as to deal with whatever misfortune has come to pass. He winces a bit, though, as Mary and John both jump at his voice and spin to face him, eyes wide and tragically twisted before they both suffuse with relief: “Assuming I’m the one you’re looking for.”


	4. Part Four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to [snogandagrope](http://archiveofourown.org/users/snogandagrope), [speakmefair](http://archiveofourown.org/users/speakmefair), and all of your lovelies, as always.

“Sherlock,” John exhales, shaky, and Sherlock’s eyes narrow, take in his stance, his frame: not obvious injury, no pressing emergency evident.

He lets out a carefully controlled sigh, tries not to lend too much credence to relief, lest it prove short-lived.

“Sherlock,” Mary says, tone resolved as she eyes John meaningfully before turning to Sherlock, head on, eyes intent. “A moment?”

Sherlock considers her carefully, tries to read her meaning, but nods, eventually, and follows her lead toward the room from which he just emerged, apprehension heavy in his veins. 

It’s not lost on him that John doesn’t follow, as the door slides closed behind them.  
_______________________________

Something in Mary’s eyes when she arrived, as she closes the door to Sherlock’s room behind them both: something there tells John this is going to do him in.

He makes himself a cuppa with unnaturally steady hands before he sits, before he slides a finger beneath the seal of the envelope and extracts the card from within.

He holds his breath against the very first line.

_My Dear John,_

_There have always been so many things—so many secrets buried deep that I’ve yearned to unearth because you convinced me the delving would be worthwhile; so many revelations that were hidden even from my own self, but that belong wholly to you, because you sparked them, because you created a consciousness within me that was capable of feeling them, of recognising their presence and their weight. We are not, nor have we ever been, the kinds to indulge in sentiment, and yet, you gave to me the very heart that burned unending, and for you, because of you, I will breach routine, and comfort, and the edges of my own resolve, because you reject confinement, and I can never thank you enough for that, John Watson. I can never properly express to you how grateful I am that, for all that I have tried, for all that I’ve been both blind and too desperate, for all that I’ve fumbled and failed and risen and fallen alike, you have remained._

_The heart of me is only here, now, to show and to swell and to offer, because you _remain_._

_I wish I could say to you that the moment I saw you, I knew you would become my world; I wish that I could own to such incredible insight, or else, such perfect observation, because it was obvious, how could it be anything less? You were, and are, extraordinary. You could be nothing more than a turning point, nothing more than the marvellous, unfailing axis upon which any being with eyes and ears and a beating heart would ache to rotate henceforth. You are unparalleled. You are all things._

_In truth, I did not know, in that moment, the extent to which you would burn me entire only to remake me, better and more blinding that I’d ever been before. What I did know, however, as I met your eyes that first time, was that in all my years, in all the places I’d been and the people I’d known, my pulse had never faltered quite like it did when you caught my eyes and held them._

_In holding my eyes, John, it was as if I could feel your embrace, the touch of you against my skin, and god, trite and trivial as it sounds and yet is emphatically _not_ —the warmth of you against my soul._

_From that moment, bit by bit, you spread through me, not with malice but with care: you enveloped me and wrapped around me, every cell protected and every empty space made bright. You never sought to change, only to give, and I did not give in return as I should have, not at first, because I did not understand._

_I did not understand, until I saw you dripping with explosives, until I counted the blinks of your eyes and knew it meant something, yet I could comprehend nothing, _nothing_ outside of the frantic swell of the pulse at your neck._

_In that moment—those moments—I swear to you that I could not breathe._

_I have seen death, John. I have seen loss and known loss, I have touched death, and yet it never touched me._

_And then, there were lights against your chest, and your life in the balance, and I felt faint, feverish, and I knew the lead that seeped immediate into my veins would drag me under and drown me swift if I faltered, if I failed, if I fell._

_Because the only thing I would succeed in falling in, falling to, falling for, was you._

_Always you._

_The time I spent without you was only survived for the need of you. The presence of you in every piece of me, indelible, more precious than I could ever convey: that is what preserved me. You were the only thing that mattered, that stayed my heart against blood leaving my body too swift for aid; that kept it beating when all seemed lost and I wanted more than anything—anything but _you_ —to slip quiet into the dark. You were then, and now remain—forevermore—my centre of gravity, my Alpha Ursae Minoris. You are my beginning, and for all that I am not a prayerful man, I pray fervently that you will do me the honour of being equally my end._

_I have confessed to you that you saved me—the promise of you, the mere recollection of you—as I traversed the extent of Moriarty’s empire and sought to set it aflame. I hope that it is obvious that the only real saving grace for the heart I only discovered, only knew at all for the way you filled it, was the aim of return, of seeing you with my eyes and drawing you to me to feel the intake of breath, the warmth of you: tangible proof against my touch that I had not failed, had not lost._

_It was a different promise, John, that I thought I’d returned to when I saw you that first night. To burn the heart._

_John, I burned as I’d had to for months before Bart’s; after, I burned everything, all that I found along with all that I was, but you were the heart, and beyond all reason, it endured._

_Seeing you there, binding yourself to another: John, for all that I’ve studied human mortality, for all that I’ve pushed at the reach of the Reaper, I’d no comprehension of just what the body would endure without crumbling, without giving in to death. I didn’t understand how the heart could break while still beating, until that moment._

_I confess to you, now, that I should not have feared, yet I cannot regret it. The torment, the agony of that night, those moments: they reminded me that nothing is static. Nothing endures without change. That which you most cherish must be held to, and held to, and held to again._

_And to you I hold, John. I hold to you, unending._

_But so long as I am in the business of revelations: I am ashamed to admit I feared again, at the wedding. The heart you filled, you taught likewise to grow, and it was a discovery of a depth I cannot describe to learn that in loving you with all of me, I was equally capable of loving your wife with the whole of my being. And you: you were gracious from the start. You accepted me, though I’d hurt you severely. And you welcomed me into your new life—a life, I think, you’d meant to build outside of me, a fresh start: you extended a hand, and you have held me close and asked me to stand not merely by you but with you, both of you. You told me once that there are limits, in dancing; I thought to correct you, that night—of the two of us, I believe I claim the deeper knowledge of the subject—but fear kept me quiet, a tightness in my chest that spoke to the loss of you both, the distance that pairing would inevitably cause._

_And yet, as I have known of you from the beginning and still I marvel: you will never fail to surprise me. Astound me. If anything, as you concretised your love for one another in the eyes of law, you did not create distance: you invited me closer, you held to _me_ , and if you taught my heart to grow, John Watson, you taught it well—I knew without doubt that I loved you both with all of me by the time I played your waltz at the wedding, and yet stunningly, I only came to love you more. _

_With every moment that passes, with every breath that’s drawn, I love you more._

_The fact that I consider you my family was never a question—I’d never dreamt, however, that you’d call me yours, in turn. And you have, John. You have made a space where no space was readily found, and you carved it in my likeness so that when I stepped into it, it felt right, it felt true, and I felt as I’d never felt before. You are safety, you are warmth, you are affection, you are _home_ as I’d never known it could be. I want to sit forever with your feet in my lap and Mary’s hands in my hair with the most appalling television humming in the background. I want to fall asleep near two bodies until I fall asleep no more._

_I want to help to raise a daughter who will have her father’s heart, and her mother’s passion, and who might find something in me to touch and hold and know, if you’ll allow it, John. If you’ll have me._

_I am still unpracticed, still unsteady in these impulses: these notions that expand and consume me, that warm me and threaten destruction all at once. You must forgive me, if I have gone about this all wrong, if I’ve overstepped a boundary I did not see, or failed to understand._

_The heart of the matter, though, does the metaphor itself fair justice: you are the heart, you have always been the heart—you are _my_ heart, John Watson, and I love you with all that is real and solid and true in this world. My hope is that you will allow our current dynamic to remain—to grow, if you’re amenable—indefinitely; but regardless: I love you. The only impossibilities I know to be beyond reproach are that fact, and one other._

_The fact that I won’t ever stop._

_Yours, wholly—_

_SH_

The tea is cold at John’s side, but for the racing of his blood and the low swoop in his stomach as he blinks unseeing, overcome at the words as they blur—John’s grateful.

He feels ill, he feels warm, and he stares at the closed door beyond and he _needs_ , god, he—

He rises to shaky legs and walks. Seeks.

There’s the whole of his heart behind that door, and there’s a half of it that needs a goddamned smack upside his head, for the way he seems to see, but not observe.

Of all the things to _miss_ , god _damnit_.

John reminds himself to breathe before he knocks.

_______________________________

“What’s,” Sherlock swallows hard, clears his expression, calms himself outwardly as his heart pounds with an ambiguous terror of a threat he does not yet know. “Has something happened?”

Mary’s own countenance is largely unreadable; she’s always been near his equal, in that. “You might say that.”

She raises the familiar card in her hand, and Sherlock’s chest tightens with impossible force.

“Mary,” and his voice his a croak before he coughs, before his throat clears, though it’s not much of an improvement: “Mary, I—”

“Where were you, Sherlock?” The tone of her voice sends a frisson of apprehension down his spine. 

“Dinner,” she clarifies, when he says nothing. “You didn’t come to dinner.”

He blinks, trying to suss out what the underlying problem is, what horrible thing has befallen, but it eludes him. 

“It wasn’t my dinner,” he tells her simply, hoping to prompt her to get to the point, but the heartbroken frustration that takes over her features is anything _but_ what he’s aiming for.

“Where did we go, Sherlock?” she prompts, staring at him pointedly.

“The Dorchester.” Of course he knew, they’d only talked about it for weeks; he’d made certain it was as excellent as it was reviewed, when they first mentioned it, so as to ensure they’d have as wonderful an evening as possible.

“Mmm, yes,” Mary nods. “Alain Ducasse. And who among us is partial to French cuisine, Sherlock?” She quirks a brow at him, and he stares back, blank. 

He loves French cuisine, and that has absolutely _nothing_ to do with the matter at hand.

His chest’s feeling unaccountably small for the way she seems to be avoiding whatever dire issue is at hand; for the way she’s clutching his card, his confessional, so tightly in her hand.

“We’d been talking about it for _weeks_ , Sherlock, you agreed to the locale,” she finally bursts out, shaking her head and sighing so deep, Sherlock swears he feels it in in the flow of his blood. “You were there when I made the reservation! I made it on _your_ laptop!”

“For you and John,” Sherlock says again—he hadn’t wanted to pay it more attention than he needed to, for the way that it stuck in his throat—but the look on her face makes it ineffably clear that he’s missing something crucial.

He hates _missing_ things.

“Christ, Sherlock,” Mary breathes out, half-speechless for a moment as she stares at him, disbelieving. “You think we’d plan a night out for _Valentine’s_ of all days, in front of you, just to faff off and leave you behind?”

Sherlock swallows, careful. He’s been doing his very best not to think too hard about it, not in those terms.

“Valentine’s is for couples, I understand,” he tells her, blank and dispassionate as he can, with whatever edge of understanding he is able to manage. “There are limits.”

Mary’s mouth drops open and she gapes at him for a good long stretch of seconds.

“Fuck,” she exhales; “fuck, I...” She huffs out a laugh without any humour in it, and something in Sherlock sinks at the sound.

“You’re an absolute _imbecile_ , Sherlock Holmes,” she tells him, nearly growls it; “to think that we’d ever _want_ to be without you. That we’d ever _dream_ of leaving you behind.”

Sherlock inhales, exhales, and plays the words over once, twice, again in his mind, to find what he heard wrong.

He can’t seem to find the piece he missed.

“Hell, Sherlock, if anyone’s got reason to be anxious that one day they won’t be enough in this, is certainly isn’t you—”

“That is an entirely ludicrous notion,” Sherlock cuts in, doesn’t have to think to offer that truth. “I—”

“This, Sherlock,” Mary says, pointed, as she raises the card and shakes it indicatively. “Did you mean this?”

Sherlock swallows. Hard.

“Of course I did,” he says, voice low to cover the way that it cracks. “Every word.”

Mary’s eyes drift closed as her chest heaves for the breaths she draws.

“Tonight,” she finally says, eyes still closed, face pained: “Tonight was about you, you know.”

Sherlock must look as dumbfounded as he feels, because when Mary looks to him, she gives him a tight smile that’s not entirely pleasant, but somehow still fond.

“I’m not nearly as skilled with words as you are,” she confesses; “I work a bit more at a distance, you know, but Sherlock,” she stares at the card in her hand for a moment before she places it carefully on the corner of the bed and settles on the edge. 

“I know what it means to feel utterly overcome with,” she stammers; “with—”

She looks to him, and he sinks down next to her: overwhelmed by the _presence_ of her, and the trembling depth in her eyes.

“With _this_ ,” she says, and god, how he hopes she means what he wants her to mean—hopes it with a strength that vibrates in the marrow of his bones. “So, I am going to try, and I, well,” she heaves a deep breath, grabs for his hand, and traces his knuckles.

“I want to tell you a story.”

She’s quiet, for a time. He watches her.

She’s exquisite.

“First time we met, John was running after one of my marks,” Mary tells him, her voice very small and far away. “Trying to be what he was with you, even though he knew he couldn’t be, knew he wasn’t,” her hand upon his tightens: “Well.”

“I stashed my rifle and found him shaking in an alley afterward. I helped him home and got some fluids in him,” her eyes flicker to his for an instant before trailing away; “and that was when he told me about you, for the first time.”

“I knew who you were, obviously. The Infamous Consulting Detective,” she grins a bit, he can see it in the pull of her cheeks, hear it in the lilt of her voice. “Plus, I mean, in my line of work,” she draws idle circles on the back of his hand. “There was overlap between our circles, now and again.” 

“But John, well,” she inhales, heavy. “The thickest person in the universe could see John loved you with everything. That whatever was left in him for all the breaking, above the bare essentials, the basest fundamentals of living,” Mary’s voice starts to snowball, gains speed and force and feeling: “Whatever there was of _him_ , Sherlock, it was there because of you.”

Sherlock only barely keeps himself from scoffing aloud, but it’s no matter: the self-loathing that still lurks beneath the surface is evident in the words: “It was broken _because_ of me.”

“Because of _love_ , Sherlock Holmes,” Mary’s hands grip his chin and turn him towards her, and there she is: fierce and fiery without a timid bone in her—his Mary. “Because of love, and that’s not a goddamned _crime_.”

“But you have to understand,” she continues, facing him straight on, now. “I fell in love with a man _in love_ , Sherlock,” she says with passion, without regret. “And I fell in love with the man he spoke to me about who he’d given his heart to, not just for the tales and the wonder of it, or the way it lit John up,” she pauses, smiles—a bit wistful as her gaze changes, almost sly, sharing a secret: “That is how I knew though, eventually, that he loved me,” she tells Sherlock: “He lit up for me like he lit up talking about you.”

Sherlock doesn’t know if his heart’s ever felt so _sore_ before, pumping harsh inside his chest the way it does at those words, at the very _idea_.

“But it wasn’t just that,” Mary goes on, smiles softer now, but no more true: “You’re quite spectacular, you know.”

The heat in Sherlock’s cheeks is something he wants to be embarrassed of, but can’t muster the will to try.

“And then, to know you in the flesh, to see you, to meet you, to grow to,” and her hand on his face is caressing, now, like he’s a thing to treasure, to keep. “And the way you responded to even the most fumbling of my attempts to reach out, you remember our first lunch?”

Sherlock smiles, recalling burnt entrees and soured wine and Mary’s flushed face as she tried to salvage the engagement.

“Indeed,” Sherlock nods: “quite fondly.”

Mary groans. “For all the wrong reasons.”

“You were endearing,” Sherlock smiles at her, twists a stray lock of her hair between his fingertips; “Enchanting, even.”

She can’t help herself but to smile back.

“And then with the planning,” Mary presses onward; “how you dove into it with me when all evidence pointed toward you being absolutely appalled by such nonsense, I—”

She swallows around something hard, just then—he can see it, and he trails his fingers down her jawline, soft and smooth and steady as she breathes in deep; breathes out.

“I,” she stumbles; starts again. “There were moments, of course, where I thought it was too good to be true, but,” she grins tight, rueful. “I’ve been in the business of lying to myself for a very long time, Sherlock, of forcing myself to ignore the bits that are too dark to bear anymore,” her voice lowers, grows smaller, sadder; “that hurt too much to think about.”

Sherlock’s hand curls around her neck, cradles gently as his thumb strokes rhythmic across her skin. 

“So when I thought too long on why, exactly, you were so eager and giving and _wonderful_ about the wedding, I told myself that you must have observed everything, of course, you must have seen how much I wanted you near me, how much I wanted to spend time with you, how much I loved you, straight to my bones…”

Mary’s eyes flicker to his, wide and wanting and a little bit desperate. 

“And that was your way of saying it was fine,” she murmurs, “saying that, maybe, just maybe, you felt something of the same.”

Maybe, god— _maybe_.

Sherlock leans in and sucks her bottom lips between his own before he kisses her, long and with infinite depth until she breaks away to breathe, flattening her hand against his chest.

“Sherlock,” she gasps; “Sherlock, I touched my husband with my eyes closed half the time at our _wedding_ , imagining _your_ hands, the feel of _you_.”

She stares at him again, into him, and Sherlock shivers for the look in her eyes, for the darkness, the width of her pupils.

“And I know he did the very same thing,” Mary whispers, and Sherlock can’t help it—he dips his chin to kiss her, once more.

“I don’t know if he ever told you,” Mary smiles soft against the corner of his mouth when they part. “He was terrified of dancing in front of everyone.”

“Yes,” Sherlock smiles, tucking her face beneath against his throat and breathing in. “I know.”

“That’s what he meant,” she tells him; “limits.”

He knows he must look puzzled as he pulls away and looks to her, for the way she reaches and smoothes the furrow between his brows.

“You only taught him how to dance with _one_ person, Sherlock,” she says, slow and careful and knowing, and it’s as if the weight of doubt is twice that of the world, for the way that realisation dawns swift against him, the crashing of a waves before the water baptises his very soul, somehow, and lightens the whole of his being.

The limits of _skill_. Not them, not _this_.

 _Christ_.

“It wasn’t,” Mary shivers against him, and he feels every tremor from her body seep through his own. “When we saw that you’d gone, I,” she stammers, and draws back to frame Sherlock’s face in her hands. 

“Sherlock, I can’t remember the last time I felt so _ill_ , through every bit of me,” she tells him, all truth and solemnity, and he knows the feeling, knows it intimately from that very night for reasons on the opposite spectrum, yet guilt licks at him, noxious, for making her ache.

“And the time we spent after the wedding,” she continues, a touch breathless as she strokes against his cheeks. “Do you even know how _relieved_ we were, when we finally stopped being such fools and realised that neither one of us wanted to be away from you that long?” Her fingertips trail, trace the line of his lips as she exhales: ”Wanted to be away from you at all?”

Sherlock feels the weight of his heartbeat like a mallet, or a battering ram, and when he breathes, he can’t deny it.

Sherlock Holmes is more heart than anything else in this moment, in this breathless, gorgeous thing he might, just _might_ be able to call _his_.

“That month was,” Mary shakes her head and smiles broadly. “God, Sherlock, that month was incredible. Just existing in your sphere, so,” she giggles a little, heady and tremulous, suddenly on the verge of tears: “So...”

Her chest brushes against his own as she breathes in deeply, steadies.

“It hurts,” she forces out, choked with it: “It’s heavy, to think that you ever _questioned_.” She looks up at him, her eyes full: “ _Sherlock_ —”

He responds by running the pads of both thumbs to catch what sorrow falls.

To catch whatever she loses, to piece her together when the need come bear.

Always.

“Yours is a touch, a warmth that I crave, that I need,” she says, quick and light, a river undammed. “The sound of your voice, the scent of your skin in the crook of your neck, the touch of your hand on my back, how you hold me, how you make me believe that the comfort’s not a weakness, that my, my, this—”

She meets his eyes with red rimming her glorious blue.

“That it’s not a weakness,” she rasps. “Not a weakness to cry into you, to seek you out and let _go_.”

He understands. He understands entirely and he is _honoured_ beyond all reason.

“Sherlock,” she gathers his hands in her own and holds them close between them. “You are constant pressure on the open wound of every wrong. You are magnetic, for all the steel I’ve tried to become.” She presses her mouth to the line of their joined grips, not quite a kiss but strong, significant.

“You are cool water and clean air and the needs of the body and the soul,” she breathes between them. “You set me to ease,” and her tongue grazes his skin as she says it. “You calm in me a restlessness I’ve never known my life to be without.”

“I can count on one hand the nights I’ve slept less than sound since I became a married woman,” she tells him, curls herself beneath Sherlock chin and sighs deep, nestles as she sometimes does in bed. “And those are the nights I didn’t spend with _both_ my loves,” she sigh deep, quiet, and Sherlock’s heart swell with the way she matches the cadence of his breathing, so close against him.

So _right_.

“And then,” she murmurs, taking his palm and settling it against the swell of her stomach, and Sherlock feels warm, everywhere, because he could never have imagined how a child he’d never seen could possibly permeate the very heart he never knew, and _yet_.

“When you talk to her,” Mary whispers, voice thick; “When you call her _mon coeur_ ,” and Mary’s voice breaks, and Sherlock shudders. “She doesn’t move like that, doesn’t seem to _know_ any other voice like she knows yours.”

Sherlock throat, in that moment, is unbearably tight.

“She loves you, I’m certain of that,” Mary tells him, forceful and certain and filled with absolutes. “If nothing else, she knows the way my heart goes fluttering when you’re nearby,” and Mary slides his hand up to her chest where he feels it, the ever frantic-yearning hum beneath her breast. “When you smile at me, when you reach out and feel for her, and your eyes light up.”

He meets her, then, with those eyes, and the way it steals her breath—the way her chest heaves beneath his hand and hitches—makes him feel weak.

Makes him feel ineffably _alive_.

“Can you even fathom how _thrilled_ I am, at the prospect of raising this child with a man like you?” she asks him, wonderingly. “You made John into the person I fell for, and you,” she shakes her head, bewildered. “Sherlock, how can you not have seen that you’re just as much a part of my heart as he is? That you’re just as essential, just as necessary?” 

Sherlock’s mouth parts, but if sounds meant to come, they’re cut off by Mary’s gasp, the small squeak she makes as her eyes brighten and she lowers Sherlock’s hand to her middle once more, to feel it.

Life. Vivacity. Personality. Promise. Perfection.

Joy.

All in a single kick.

“She agrees, god,” Mary nearly sobs; “ _Sherlock_...”

Sherlock is blinking rapid, overcome, his breathing thin and swift and harsh; he almost misses how Mary reaches, extracts something from her pocket until he catches the glint of something in the clench of her fist.

“The sentimental value doesn’t quite translate, I’ve learned,” Mary starts, laughs lightly: short, and not a little strained. “John was searching them out for _weeks_ before he found them balled inside an old dress sock.”

Mary’s fingers uncurl, and Sherlock laughs, and something in him pulls and snaps, and its gorgeous for the breaking as he sees: identification tags. One circular, one oblong, the chain swaying between them as Mary breathes.

“In a _sock_ ,” Sherlock whispers, marvelling. “I looked for them,” he confesses, breathless; “of course they were in the one place I wouldn’t touch.”

Mary’s laughter, now, is a startled bark—genuine, and it warms him in the pit of his stomach. “ _That’s_ what’s sacred to the great Sherlock Holmes? A man’s sock drawer?”

Sherlock’s lips quirk, and the warmth in him just builds, just grows as he stares at the tags in Mary’s palm, catching against the light as it catches in his throat. 

“Do not underestimate the importance of an accurate sock index, Mary Watson.”

Mary’s giggle, then, is trembling; laden with feeling. “Well, regardless,” she breathes in deep. “These,” and Mary reaches, holds them out closer to Sherlock, offers them, but he can’t grab, he can’t touch just yet.

She sees it, recognises what he cannot hold and meets him, helps him: lifts his hand to press against her own so that her offering is clasped between them, warming by the second in their touch.

“They’re the soul of us, Sherlock,” she exhales, and it permeates unbearable: so full and strong and true. “All three of us,” Mary tells him; “we’re fighters. We don’t surrender lightly.” 

“This is,” and Mary stares at their hands, at the way the chain that trails from their hold shakes with the tremble of their joined grasp. “This is the heart, Sherlock,” she squeezes his fingers and lifts his knuckles to her lips as her eyes slip closed.

“This is everything we are, everything we have stood for and promised and grown to be, what sits in the core of us, what it means to clutch desperately at what we love and fight beyond the death to keep it safe. This is us, this is me and John and you, this the heart and the soul and I,” her voice cracks and her eyes snap to him, open and honest and glistening with all of the feeling Sherlock’s chest cannot contain as she breathes out, rasping: “May I?”

Sherlock doesn’t know what she means, not at first; not until she loosens her grip and his eyes widen as she reaches, unbuttons the top of his shirt before she works the chain around his curls and settles the tags about his neck, pressing the two tokens against the centre of his sternum, her palm cupped just over the undeniable pump of his heart beneath the skin.

“This is me, and this is John,” Mary whispers, “and neither of us wants to be anywhere but here.” 

Her hand slips down for a moment as she stares at Sherlock’s chest, and Sherlock knows for the way that the tags clang that the beat there is visible, is tangible as she bends, as she kisses his heaving chest and presses her mouth to his skin, stays; holds.

“Just here, Sherlock,” she breathes against him, against the heart of him as she flattens the metal against him again, the gesture laden with meaning. “For as long as we live.”

If there are words—if there have ever been words, Sherlock does not know them, cannot find them, knows them to be inadequate for all that they may try. He reaches, covers her hand with his own and hopes with all that he is that is speaks where he can’t.

“The blood type’s all that right on mine,” she says softly, straightening before leaning against him, speaking to the crook of his neck. “Fitting, maybe,” she breathes. “Not that you don’t know all the rest.”

He presses his lips against the crown of her head, and its only on contact that he realises how the tremble.

“I love you,” she gasps against him, and his skin is damp where she presses into his frame. “God, Sherlock, I love you so much...”

“As I love you, Mary,” he tells her truly, presses her hand to his chest all the more tightly. “More than you can dream.”

They breathe like that, for a moment, for many moments. They breathe until the find a balance between them, between air and blood and the frantic beat beneath their palms.

“It’s a promise, you understand?” Mary says, finally, and it’s soft, yes, but it shakes with such strength. “You didn’t really think you could offer yourself twice over and not get two selves pledged to you in kind?”

Sherlock didn’t know what he thought, exactly, only that to do anything but give himself to these people, to these pieces of his very soul was unimaginable.

Save that it was more imaginable, somehow, than this; than ever knowing _this_.

“If I didn’t think you’d hate me forever,” Mary starts, but Sherlock lifts their hands to cup her cheek.

“Impossible,” he breathes, and when their eyes meet his heart trips, and he wishes he’d left her hand just there, wishes she could feel what she does to him. She smiles, and leans to gasp quiet, to nuzzle soft against the side of his face.

“I’d have asked your brother to make a legal exception for the marriage itself,” she confesses to the line of his jaw, and there it is again: the tripping in his chest.

“Unnecessary,” he exhales, and he means it. Mere formality: this is more than any piece of paper, any license to declare.

“He’s already taken the necessary steps to make it viable in everything but the name, god knows how,” Mary tells him, and Sherlock feels himself tense, not so much because it’s _Mycroft_ , but because unnecessary as it is, it truly _is_ , it means something he cannot fathom fully that it’s done, that they did this for _him_.

“He’s quite convenient, I have to say,” Mary’s still speaking, though Sherlock is reeling and takes everything in on something of a delay. “But you are my spouse, and John’s, as much as either of us is to each other, in every place it matters.” 

Tripping turns to leaping, once it sinks in, and Sherlock feels impossibly, unconscionably light in those moments, until Mary speaks again.

“And,” she breathes in deep, leads Sherlock’s hand again to her lips and kisses the fingertips, the junctures, mouths the lines drawn in the flesh. “He’s assured me that you’ll have all the rights as her parent, as much as John or I,” Mary tells the centre of his palm, warm and wet and real: “If that’s something that you want.”

The leaping, then, ceases entirely; ceases, as the world stops around him and the pressure in his chest rises lethally until it bursts.

The way the air in his lungs expands, rebels against the sudden recrudescence of his pulse at triple speed and aching depth is horrific, save for the fact that it’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever known.

“You mean this,” Sherlock rasps, utterly undone. “You truly,” he gasps against the overwhelming swell of feeling, stammers: “You—”

“Sherlock,” and the way she says his name will never stop thrilling him, he’s certain of it. “I saw John, without you,” she strokes his cheek fondly, solemn and yet _beloved_ , and god help him, but he _leans_. “Before there was,” she starts, shakes her head and looks to him, and he reads what she means in her eyes; nods to spare them both. 

“To lose you now would end him,” she says, unwavering, and the pang that starts behind Sherlock’s ribs is only curtailed by the depth of her tone as she adds, quick and sure and fervent as only she can be:

“Don’t think for a _minute_ it wouldn’t end me just as quick.”

Sherlock reaches for her, pulls her close against him and kisses her hard, deliberate and she gives as much in return, and it’s a seal, it’s a truth, it’s a _vow_ , goddamnit, and it tastes of honey and fresh mint and longing when it’s met, when it’s filled. 

Sherlock gasps into it, shaking, it’s so impossibly sweet.

They don’t part when the knock sounds, but they slow, they drift, and when the door creaks and John steps in, they’re staring at one another, lips swollen and lungs still straining.

It’s Mary, who looks away first, but Sherlock follows suit, reading turmoil in John’s face and fearing the clench in his gut above all things.

“I’ll see to the eatables,” Mary says as she stands, offering John a smile, a peck at the corner of his lips and a hand on his shoulder as she moves to leave, but pauses.

She walks back to Sherlock and kisses him again, long and slow and sumptuous, luxurious, and Sherlock’s heart is almost full enough with it as she pulls away, as she leaves, that he can hope through the heaviness in John’s eyes, suffused through John’s whole body.

Almost.


	5. Part Five

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to [snogandagrope](http://archiveofourown.org/users/snogandagrope) and [weepingnaiad](http://archiveofourown.org/users/weepingnaiad): this was the chapter that required the most cutting and pasting and nipping and tucking thus far, and without these two, I'd have really _no_ chance of getting this all posted before the 14th—and who wants a Valentine's Fic that's not on time of Valentine's?!

“John,” Sherlock stares, wide-eyed, chest heaving as John considers him, as John takes one step toward him. 

“John, I didn’t,” Sherlock stammers, staring at the card in John’s hand, trying to parse the nature of the sheer _intensity_ in John’s eyes as the man takes a second step, a third, and Sherlock would swear that John could hear the thrumming of his heart, for how close he’s got, is getting: “I mean—”

John’s mouth is on his own before Sherlock can finish, before he can _breathe_ , and the man tastes of the wind off the moors, the taste of ash on an open fire burning bright and safe without ending, without dying: he tastes of _John_ , and that is nectar and ambrosia for the only gods that Sherlock cares to know, who dwell in his heart despite the way each chamber clenches, shakes, fills: despite how they must drown in this, in _this_ , for more moments than any of them can breathe.

“You,” John is speaking against his lips: “Are,” and there’s a piece of Sherlock’s consciousness that registers the soft rustle of the card as it drops from John’s fingers, as John’s hands wrap firm around Sherlock’s neck instead. 

“The most,” John nips at the crease of Sherlock’s mouth, the corner, and Sherlock shivers when John’s tongue traces the inner slickness of his lower lip. 

“Godawfully _dense_ genius,” John gasps between Sherlock’s teeth as he delves deeper, as he pushes up against Sherlock’s body and the heat of them, the hardness growing between their bodies, strained with need, brushes hot and desperate through their clothes, through their veins: “That ever lived.”

Sherlock’s jaw slackens at that: at the words, at the sad gleam of mischief and feeling and wanting and _needing_ all at once—and the feel of John’s lashes teasing the line of Sherlock’s cheek before John takes full advantage of his parted lips and slides his tongue inside, licks wantonly at all the words, all the breath Sherlock may have had to reply.

“You,” John pulls back to inhale, desperate, as Sherlock follows with a whimper he can’t withhold. “You, Sherlock, you,” and John’s touching him as if he’s precious as he rolls his hips upward against Sherlock’s body and devours his waiting lips, the shining swell of them, once more. 

“ _God_ ,” John pants, moans in between long draws on the whole of Sherlock’s mouth, every hint of breath he manages passing through John, taken in John, given by John, as well it should be, should always be.

“God, I just,” and John’s kissing him, short but sharp, pointed as he darts in, sucking swift at the flesh of Sherlock’s face, his neck, his chest where it peaks out from his shirt. “How could you,” John’s lip catches against Sherlock’s skin, and it is exquisite: “How can you even _wonder_ , I—”

“John,” Sherlock moans low, as John’s open mouth lingers on the protrusion of his clavicle: “ _John_.”

“Look at me,” John whispers, and it is so heady, so fierce a sound as the gasp of it condenses electric against Sherlock’s skin, and Sherlock does as he’s asked, looks at John and loses himself in the blue flame of his impossible eyes, the flush of his perfect skin, the gold warmed like a sunrise, like every beginning that John _is_ , that John ignites in Sherlock’s chest, and Sherlock can barely focus, can barely stand John so close without _touching_ just now, with everything so charged and bright and _near_ —

John’s hands frame is face, and hold him, gazes locked, and Sherlock breathes, breathes, and John is like the first blush of spring, like London after rain. 

“Look at me,” and Sherlock does—Sherlock always does, Sherlock thinks there is a quirk in his genetic composition that prompts, that takes, that _requires_ the whole of him to be enraptured by John Watson. 

That always has.

“Look at me and read whatever it is you need to in me, so that you’ll understand this, so that you’ll never delete this, or warp it, or twist it into something less than what it is, because I need you to believe the truth when I say it, Sherlock,” and Sherlock’s seen John determined, seen him intent and devoted entirely to a singular cause.

He’s never seen him _vibrate_ with it, though—never seen him gravitate to the notch of Sherlock’s throat and press his open mouth there against the racing pulse that jumps—quite like this.

“I need you to know it and feel it as deep as I do,” John whispers a shiver into the marrow of Sherlock’s bones: “as deep as I barely know how to stand.”

Sherlock’s trembling with it, still, as John kisses his palm, holds his hands between them bodies and breathes, and breathes, and breathes.

“How are you real?” John whispers, moans into the heat of Sherlock’s shin.

“I could ask you the very same thing,” Sherlock breathes out, careful, because it’s delicate, this place they’ve stumbled to, this opening he’s led them toward where everything is sacred and nothing is unnamed. “I’ve often thought to,” he confesses, “but the solipsistic contradictions involved rendered the point rather moot.”

John laughs, light, and it doesn’t last, and Sherlock only realises he’s tracing patterns on the inside of John’s wrist when John lifts Sherlock’s own wrist to his lips and kisses close, his breath damp, the individual drops like fire, like salvation rained benevolent upon Sherlock’s burning skin. 

“How did you hide this?” he asks, marvelling. “How have you ever made the world question the,” and John lingers at the pulse there as it heightens, as it pounds: “the utter _magnificence_ of this heart?”

Sherlock breaths come harsh, fractured as John kisses the thin skin, traces the lines of the radius, the ulna.

“The human psyche shies from pain,” Sherlock whispers. “Natural defence mechanism.” 

“Every time I was reminded,” he exhales slow as John traces the cephalic vein. “I deleted what I could, and hid the rest,” Sherlock’s breath catches as John kisses the crease of his elbow: “until I was reminded once again.”

John rests his head at the hinge joint and looks to him, reaches up to tangle fingers in Sherlock’s hair. 

“I was often reminded,” Sherlock breathes, leaning into the touch: “once there was you.”

There is a stillness, that settles, if only for a time, and the warmth of John’s body, unwavering against him is a bliss that neither mental stimulation nor injectable substance can touch. 

The strength of John’s touch, John’s hold around him is a balm for every pain.

“I am sorry,” John leans, inhales against Sherlock’s hair and Sherlock lets him, relishes the intimacy as John breathes him in, and Sherlock loses himself, for a moment suspended beyond time, in the strange transcendence of connection, in the way Sherlock feels desperately full like this, just like this—in the way Mary’s perfume clings to John’s collar and warms him where John’s arms, John’s breath, John’s being doesn’t reach.

“Whatever for?” Sherlock murmurs, and oh, the pump of blood at John’s clavicle is a masterpiece in the telling, the way it teases, wanton and warm at Sherlock’s lips.

“If I failed to make it clear to you,” John whispers, and Sherlock’s curls flutter, tickle at the skin with every breath John takes; “If I didn’t do enough to make you know what you mean, what you are.”

John shifts, puts just enough distance between them so he can look at Sherlock, meet his eyes as the stretch of his palm meets the centre of Sherlock’s chest.

“If I didn’t make it absolutely known, beyond any doubt, that the union I pledged myself to needed three hearts from the very start, if it was ever going to survive.”

John’s fingers clench against Sherlock sternum, clutch at the shirt as Sherlock’s pulse tumbles, overcome with all that’s been given, this night. 

“I am sorry, Sherlock,” John whispers, and his eyes are a missive, an entreaty to touch so Sherlock does; he cups John’s face and lets him lean, revels in the fit of John’s cheek in his palm, the proximity of the words as they trail out, soft but steady:

“I am sorry if I ever made you think you were anything less than the heart of either one of us. That you were anything other than essential to the very hope of breathing.”

And it’s funny, in a way that’s probably a bit not good, because in hearing that, in _feeling_ those words as they’re spoken, Sherlock can do many things—he can count the impossible flutter of his heartbeat, he can calculate the span of John’s open hand, fingertip to outstretched fingertip; he can see the future as a bright thing, filled with colour and wonder and arms around him and warmth in the night and a small voice and curious eyes finding the world for the first time, that look at him with adoration that hasn’t yet learned for to qualify or contain, and he sees other eyes, eyes that have seen much—too much—that look at him, that gain wrinkles, that are framed with strands of grey and still look to _him_ with the kind of hard-won and deep-seated _love_ he never thought he’d recognise, let alone somehow hold enough to know the brilliance of its caress against the heart of him.

When John speaks, with those _words_ , Sherlock feels as if he could move mountains, slay demons, part seas: _anything_.

Anything but breathe.

Oh, John. His John. 

His John, and his Mary, and their child, and the _love_.

Sherlock finds that his chest aches, though not generally, more centred on the ribs: a confinement, a boundary for a feeling that’s far too immense for the cage of simple bones.

“It’s still so new,” Sherlock finally says, and his voice is smaller than he means it to be, than he feels entirely comfortable with, but this is John: this is _John_ , and he understood Mary, truly he did, when she spoke of the wonder, the novelty of _this_ being _all right_ , and so he lets so voice be soft, uncertain. He doesn’t narrow his eyes when they yearn to widen, to show all that he is and all that his soul’s learned to hide.

Sherlock covers the hand John still holds to his chest and cradles it, laces their fingers, presses it close and breathes to feel it, to know it, to make that touch everlasting.

There is something immense, something unfathomable in the way it feels to indulge that want, that desire beyond any necessity, any pressing requisite: it _will_ be everlasting.

“I’ve never,” Sherlock starts, and fights the weight of every feeling for the breath to make them known. “To want, to need, to have such depth of sentiment thrive here,” and he clasps John’s hand to him all the tighter: “and to have it be _known_ , John,” Sherlock voice breaks, and he shakes his head against the torrent, but John’s free hand cups his face, and John’s hand beneath his own flattens and invites every fumbling throb of desperate _love_ underneath that Sherlock could ever hope to give, and it steals Sherlock’s breath all over again, and he doesn’t mind.

How could he?

“Mmm,” John hums, and Sherlock feels wrapped, enveloped in the sound. “People would talk,” John says simply, low and filled with a softness, a depth of unspoken understanding that breeds delight, and it’s everything Sherlock needs: it’s everything that unleashes the joy he’d long concealed for the way that it multiples, distracts, consumes.

Miraculous.

Sherlock laughs, wet and unbound into the crook of John’s, inhales the scent of him there as he mouths against John’s skin: “They do so little else.”

John kisses him, then, and _god_ , Sherlock could not possibly care less about _talk_.

“You are unbelievable,” John says between their lips, swollen now, the blood teased to the fore, and the words are ones that Sherlock’s often heard, except never quite like this: as if he is worthy, and awe-inspiring, and impossible in the best sense there is, and while Sherlock knows he is none of those things, to hear them from _John_ is like watching the birth of the cosmos.

“It’s a crime,” John whispers, “that you ever thought to hide the heart of you.”

Sherlock trembles, because he knows that John means his words, means them with _everything_ , and this is beyond what Sherlock comprehends with his mind, with his intellect: there is no logic in this, and yet he understands it wholly, and it pounds hard in his blood, and it is terrifying.

It is wondrous. 

“If the heart of me,” Sherlock exhales, and moves John’s hand against him less upon the centre near the muscle in question, and more upon the swell of it, hard against the ribs. “If the heart of me is worthy of anything, of anyone, it is because of you, John. It is because you made it impossible to do anything but love, and love, and love in the face of you. And then, when I thought the heart could hold no more, you showed me another who inspired me to give, and because you taught the heart of me to grow, I could, _it_ could. And you keep doing that, John, you keep offering and teaching me and stretching in my chest so that to lose you, any of you now would collapse the whole, because you have stretched the heart of me beyond recognition,” and when John presses his lips to the hollow of Sherlock’s throat, Sherlock cradles the back of John’s neck and holds him there, begs him without words to just breathe against him, warm and near.

“You have changed the heart of me, transformed it into something that is made for things bigger, things brighter than I’ve ever dared to know.”

John smiles, broad into his skin: “And you know a great deal.”

Sherlock nuzzles against John’s head beneath his chin. “I would never stop knowing, long past when I stop breathing,” he murmurs; “if what there was to know, was you. Both of you. All of you.”

John breathes against him, heavier than before, for a full stretch of moments before he shifts, raises his body and resettles so that their faces are nearly touching, fully aligned.

“Do you think I would even want to _fathom_ doing this without you? Living my _life_ without _you_?” John asks him, solemn and fierce: “Let alone trying, actually giving it a go?”

Sherlock’s throat is very tight, quite suddenly. His mouth is very dry.

“Fuck, Sherlock,” John draws out low, trembling: “You _idiot_.”

John’s hands are on his face again, cupping, holding, stroking with desperate care. “Are you,” he starts, stares at Sherlock and shakes his head slow: “Do you understand, what a fucking godsend you are? How, how—”

John sighs, closes his eyes, and when he opens them anew, meets Sherlock’s, they’re shining.

“Are you ever jealous?” John asks him, and for the leap of meaning, Sherlock understands entirely.

“I was terrified,” he answers truly, remembering that first night, when he’d returned to a woman seated next to his John and a bruising in his chest, from the inside and out: “I was terrified when I thought you’d been taken from me.”

“You had me first,” John states it, simply, but Sherlock doesn’t pause, doesn’t acknowledge it just yet.

“Or worse,” he carries on the former train: “that you’d,” he swallows hard: “forgotten.”

“Never,” John tells him with a weight that feels safe and perfect. “Jesus, Sherlock, look at me.”

Again, as always, Sherlock does, Straight on. 

He’s _beautiful_.

“ _Never_ ,” John promises, and Sherlock wonders if that’s how his words were heard, because it is a vow.

It is a _vow_.

“Either way,” Sherlock clears his throat, and looks away, because he is not so strong, just now, to bear the weight of that promise, of that claim direct. “The desire to equate chronological order with order of preference is a dull and inaccurate tendency, I mean,” his lips quirk; “that would make Mycroft the favourite by default.”

John chuckles, and Sherlock feels it in his body, the movement of the air: tastes it.

Exquisite.

“Terribly flawed approach, then, obviously,” John smiles at him, like he’s made of stardust and the shadows on the moon, and Sherlock’s heart shivers, fibrillates unruly, overcome and overjoyed in ways he’s never known as he beams, lets the sensation of it stretch across his face.

“Obviously.”

“Do you ever think it’s,” John picks up, once the smile’s tamed itself, faded: is missed. “I dunno, unfair?” he ventures “Sharing?”

Sherlock thinks on it, tilts his head. “You share her.” 

“We share you,” John says with a certain emphasis that makes Sherlock’s veins tighten, his blood pump hard.

“Do _you_ think it’s unfair?” Sherlock asks, and something eases in him, full of relief, when John’s face overflows with a wonder more deserved by a sunrise, or the endless stretch of the ocean, or the face of a benevolent god.

“I think it’s nearly too good to be true,” he whispers, and Sherlock takes his hand, threads their fingers tight.

“You’re not the only one.”

“Except it is,” John squeezes his hand meaningfully. “It is true, Sherlock, it’s,” he turns, and stares at Sherlock again with that look Sherlock thinks he doesn’t deserve, and says words that Sherlock knows he isn’t worthy to receive: 

“You are a fucking marvel,” John murmurs, filled with an awe misplaced. “You are, you’re...”

“John,” Sherlock cuts him off, hoarse, heart pounding with a sudden wave of terror once more. “I’m,” he stumbles. “I’m afraid that I’ll—” 

John’s hand is on him, he reminds himself. John is here.

John loves him, beyond on logic or sense.

 _Breathe_.

“I don’t know that I’ll be enough.”

John stares at him, blinks at him, for moments that feel like days before he turns, before he flattens his body against Sherlock’s and kisses him: gentle, lingering, glorious.

Adoring in ways that do not have names.

“You are more than I could ever ask for,” John mouths against his lips. “You are more than I man can imagine into being.” He pulls back and looks at Sherlock, stares at him with an honesty, a vulnerability that makes Sherlock’s chest ache. 

“The real question is,” John tells him, softly: “Can I, can _we_ , tedious idiots that we are,” and the quirk of his lips is stunted, sad: “Can _this_ ever be enough for _you_?”

Sherlock is blindsided by the fact that the words are spoken. Sherlock is blindsided by the fact that they’re genuinely _asked_.

“You,” Sherlock starts; “you, John, and Mary, and the baby, you are all that _is_ ,” and he lines a palm against John’s cheek, begs him with his eyes to just _see_. “I don’t recognise the world outside of you, anymore, it’s wrong, it’s empty, wherever you’re not, and I’m, it’s, I—”

“I love you,” John cuts him off, so emphatic, so devoted it steals the breath from Sherlock’s lungs. “God, it’s,” John’s breath huffs, and he licks his lips nervously, giddily. 

“It’s not enough,” John declares with a bewildered sort of grin. “You’re raised with this idea that those words are the pinnacle of what you can give except it’s not _enough_.”

“But god, Sherlock,” John exhales, shaky: “I’d give you the heart in my chest this moment if I thought it would prove what you’re worth, what you _mean_.” 

“You have mine,” Sherlock takes John’s hand, holds it with a strength he didn’t know he could bring to bear in this moment, after so _much_. “You are mine, you have mine, you are...”

Sherlock swallows hard, reluctant to tread the waters that gape wide, and yet.

“I came back for you.”

John stares at him, and Sherlock forces himself to stare back, and when John begins to shake with all the things they’ve endured, all the things they’ve left to settle off-key now aligning, now righting themselves around them, within them: when John begins to shake Sherlock holds him, clutches him closer, closer until they can both feel the thrum of his heart in between.

“I,” John gasps, before he steadies once more. “I am a soldier, Sherlock. I am a doctor, and a soldier, and if there is one thing I know from them both, it is death.”

“But Sherlock, I will not survive the loss of you intact. Not again,” John leans back, and stares him down, unwavering, as he speaks that unalterable truth. “A soldier, and a markswoman, and any child born of both has to have some mettle in them, but we will none of us survive the loss of you, in any way, for any reason.”

John blinks, and in an instant, the ferocity is cracked, shattered, and it burns Sherlock heart to see John look so broken as he breathes: “I’m not sure we’d have it in us to even try.”

“So look at me,” because Sherlock had turned from it, shamefully: had turned from a John who hurt so much for _him_.

“Please, Sherlock,” he asks, and Sherlock does turn, however slowly. 

“Look at me and read all of the things I don’t know the words for,” John pleads, but the strength starts to build in him again, as it always does in this marvel of a man. “For once in your life, Sherlock, look at me, and when you deduce the heart of me don’t think twice when you recognise what’s there, when you find the whole of yourself there, when the beating mimics the way that you compose, when the strength of the blood is in your arms around me, when the friction of each motion catches where you stretch between Mary’s body and mine.”

He grips Sherlock chin and pulls him in close again, just as Sherlock’s heart threatens to give out for the _feeling_.

“Look at me,” John tells him, low and seeped in sentiment, in light: “Look and see _everything_ , Sherlock, and then ask me if you think I’ll ever let you go.”

Sherlock looks. Sherlock sees.

Sherlock kisses John like it’s the last thing he’ll ever do.

And John kisses back. John _kisses back_.

And Sherlock _believes_ that it never has to end.

So once their breathing settles, once John’s let his lips grow cool to presses his mouth to the rest of Sherlock’s body, trailing mandalas and the wonders of the world against his skin—once John’s settled, fixated on pressing kisses to Sherlock’s hand, up and down his fingers, and then one finger, just so, his tongue running, tracing, swirling about the proximal bone, it’s not that Sherlock isn’t surprised, it’s not that his heart doesn’t seize a bit madly in his chest when he feels the solid, skin-warmed circlet of metal pressed up against his palm, held fast between John’s hand and his own.

It’s more that it feels inevitable. It’s more that the warmth of it cascading through his chest makes the torment of his thrumming heart feel like a gift he’s not supposed to know.

“Do you want me to get down on one knee?” John breathes into his neck, and Sherlock shivers, gasps, and if the wetness in his eyes seeks refuge on his cheeks as he clutches John’s body to his own with a force unbreakable, well.

That’s rather inevitable, too. 

“I couldn’t, you know. Before you came back,” John murmurs against him, and his voice, his face against Sherlock’s skin is slick, is flooded with feeling: “The limp was…”

The words are abandoned for John’s open mouth pressing, sucking soft and sure so that all the vows in the cosmos are written, are imbedded into the skin, deeper than words: Sherlock files them, each one that he feels, discerns against his flesh, and encodes them over and over in his mind, in his soul, so as never to forget.

He is lightness, he is air, he is beyond the mortal coil when John pulls back: John is bright and full and true as Sherlock stares at him, as Sherlock measures the heavy heave of John’s chest in the dark.

“Will you do me the honour, then?” John asks it, a murmur. “Will you be my husband as much as Mary is my wife?” He lifts Sherlock’s hand, leaves the ring in the centre. “Will you be her husband as much as I am?”

Sherlock blinks, watching John as he closes his fingers about the ring, only looks away when he feels the indentations: subtle, lining the inside of the band.

He raises it to his face, and if he was overcome before, the words nearly unmake him:

_**Whatever remains, must be true. JHW+WSSH+MEMW** _

_However improbable,_ he thinks, and the oxygen in the room grows thin, so he looks to the man who keeps him, who holds him, who is life and light and the _heart_ and when John kisses him, it is with the sort of passion that burns not hearts, but worlds, and Sherlock knows that this is the only thing, the only place, the only reality that is true, forevermore.

So when Sherlock kisses back, it is with want and devotion in equal measures, it is assent and adoration and wonder and the breath that makes up life itself and their lips don’t part as John fits the ring to Sherlock’s finger, as John shifts Sherlock's world ever so perfectly toward the _more_.

The world is wide and bright and full in ways that Sherlock had never thought to consider. The heart can beat three-times its strength, can fill three-times its size to reveal what secrets lie beyond mere being, what life is meant to hold.

“Now,” John rests his forehead against Sherlock’s once they pull back, once they pant for air like the drowning, too euphoric: “If we don’t eat the obscenely overpriced bits of random food I got us off the À La Carte menu, and it turns out I endured the most hateful glares from the waitstaff at the Dorchester for nothing, I’ll be fairly less than pleased.” 

Maybe it’s the ecstasy surging through him, or the lightness that consumes as he lets doubt slip free, or maybe it’s John, just John.

It’s John: and Sherlock laughs, and he only laughs fuller, harder, as John smiles and kisses the joy straight from Sherlock’s lips. 

“I love you,” John breathes there, into him. “With _everything_ , Sherlock.”

He straightens, and he picks up the card he’d tossed aside before.

“To read it, to see it like this, I,” John swallows, and catches Sherlock’s eyes with intent.

“Thank you,” he says, and it’s a deep and trembling thing. “But I need you to know that there will never be reason to doubt, okay? Not ever. So please,” he reaches for Sherlock and squeezes his shoulder, firm. “Don’t question this, don’t question me, don’t question _us_.”

Sherlock stares back, feels his own eyes sting, and with the magnificent weight on his left hand screaming truths he can’t dismiss, can never doubt again, he nods.

It is more than enough.

“Come on,” John grins, pulling him close and kissing him, fast and hard like he cannot possibly get enough, not _ever_ , before walking them toward the door. “I sure as hell hope you like sea urchin, because I think there’s one waiting in the kitchen that cost me forty quid.”


	6. Part Six

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Love to [speakmefair](http://archiveofourown.org/users/speakmefair), [weepingnaiad](http://archiveofourown.org/users/weepingnaiad), and [snogandagrope](http://archiveofourown.org/users/snogandagrope) for idea bouncing, and suffering snippets <3

When Sherlock’s head hits his pillow, it’s with the lazy contentment of the well-fed and the well-loved. When Mary’s body heats the whole of his right side, and John’s weight presses close against his left, Sherlock’s own eyes closed, and if the way a heart flutters has ever been done justice in verse, it is the sensation of this moment as he breathes, and feels more full than he will ever be enough to bear: it is this feeling, wild and burning and wonderful beyond measure, between the hearts and souls that shape his world—this is the feeling the poets, the fools of love have meant to capture, meant to convey.

They’ve never come close, he thinks, but they’d hoped, and maybe it’s enough. To hope, now.

For Sherlock is a fool in love.

“Mmmm,” John hums against the crease of Sherlock’s axilla, nuzzling Sherlock’s bare skin. “It’s the life, isn’t it?” and Sherlock feels John’s hand wind around his waist, meet Mary’s from the opposite side of Sherlock’s body and clasp, just above the sight convex of Sherlock’s middle. 

“World’s only consulting detective, with a full stomach and a smile on his face, curled up nice and warm between us.”

Mary’s smile is hot, smooth, gorgeous against Sherlock’s biceps, the swell of her stomach fitted perfectly against the curve of Sherlock’s hip. 

“I honestly cannot think of anything better,” she murmurs into the crook of Sherlock’s neck, and Sherlock shudders with the vibration, the timbre of her voice, his chest full of feather and his mouth stretch into a wide grin he cannot control. 

“Hmm,” John traces the line of Sherlock’s clavicle first with his fingers, then when his lips: “I could think of a thing or two,” and Sherlock shivers, sighs with it as John’s mouth brings the blood to the surface, tempts lightly, languid at Sherlock’s control.

“Don’t I get a say?” Sherlock exhales, long and satisfied even as he yearns, as Mary mouths at the line of his neck, as John teases the uneven heave of his chest for every touch so full of feeling, so full of _aching_ that his heart can barely stand the pull.

“You got the _lobster_ ,” John nips playfully at the hollow of Sherlock’s throat, his tongue a revelation in that dip, that valley of his flesh.

“Which was excellent,” Sherlock murmurs low, and relishes the feel of the rumble against John’s taste buds, wet; against Mary’s lips at the pulse in his veins; “and far more deserving of its price tag than the urchin.”

John laughs against Sherlock, and Sherlock’s heart leaps up to it, to grasp for it and hold it dear.

“I love your skin,” John laps at the very flesh in question, sloppy and wet and goddamned magnificent as Sherlock arches into the trail of that mouth across his chest. “So fucking soft,” John murmurs, sucking the line of Sherlock’s ribs in slow, deliberate succession. “Always tastes so much like _you_.”

“Not entirely surprising,” Sherlock drawls, but it’s breathless, and it sounds more like a gasp, which is fine, really—fitting; “given that it is _mine_.”

“Hush,” John chides him, dragging teeth now down Sherlock’s sternum. “You’re entirely too articulate,” and John’s hand starts to trail close to Sherlock’s thigh, then in. “Must do something about that.”

Mary’s starting to kiss down his spine as John moves from half-straddling Sherlock’s hips to shimmying down his legs toward the knees. 

“Wait,” Sherlock says, shaky and unsure just why he’s speaking, why he’s doing anything but sinking entirely into the feeling of two bodies who _want_ him, and desperately so: “I—”

“Let us give you a wedding night to remember, Sherlock,” Mary breathes, open-mouthed against the globe of his shoulder, her exhalations setting his every nerve-ending aflame. “Let us take care of you like you deserve,” she whispers, and he can feel the texture, the subtle lines of her lips against the skin of him, so sheer.

“For all the ways we love you,” John gazes up at him, settled now around his navel, where he kisses, where he buries his face and breathes through Sherlock’s shuddering. “Let us love you like _this_ , as wholly as we ever dared, darling.”

His eyes through his lashes are like sunrise on the sky. “Will you?”

Sherlock blinks, swallows, and he thinks that the way he trembles, the way his eyes drift closed and clench against the wave of emotion that consumes, pumped with the blood in him as it gathers, rises to this, this moment of completion and perfect communion in heat and skin as its promised, as its offered: he thinks it’s more an answer than his voice, than his words could ever manage.

But to be sure: he reaches down to cup John’s face, and turns to meet Mary’s lips, firm and full and heartfelt enough to seal his heart to both of them.

John presses a grin in his eighth intercostal space. “Now,” John drags his lips, slick against where Sherlock skin is burning, raised in gooseflesh and shaking with his thinning breaths: “Where were we?”

Mary’s arm snakes around Sherlock’s flank, slides further toward the curls at the juncture of his legs as Mary purrs: “You were just about there,” she tells John over Sherlock’s shoulder, just as she presses her body flush against Sherlock’s back, her tight nipples searing through the lightness of her nightgown, the fullness of her breasts splayed to either side, developing his frame, splaying protective, possessive along him skin. 

“I was on my way,” Mary mouths across his vertebrae, sinking lower, lower until she’s got Sherlock turned on his side without him even noticing the motion, not until John’s breathing heavy at Sherlock’s groin, and Mary’s lips are at pursed at his sacrum, her hands spreading the cleft of his arse open as she whispers against him:

“ _Here_.”

“Christ, Mary,” Sherlock gasps, because before he can so much as breath with any meaning, her tongue is lining the crack, parting it, and John’s dragging open lips against his twitching prick, down to suck delicately, taunting and worshipful all at once against the tip, lapping slow, daring at the slit of him. 

“Oh, god,” Sherlock moans, strangled as John grips the base of him, puts just the barest pressure of the heel of his palm against Sherlock’s sac. “ _John_ —”

“You’re unfathomable, like this,” Mary sucks against the swell of his arse, her fingertips teasing his entrance: “The _lines_ of your _body_ —”

“The muscles, Jesus,” John agrees emphatically, speaking around Sherlock’s wet length, pulling off enough to make the words, to look Sherlock in the eye and _marvel_ , for all that it does to Sherlock’s dangerously uncoordinated pulse. “You’re a fucking Greek god.”

“Adonis,” Mary groans, wanton as her tongue teases the tight ring of muscle, wetting the pucker, slicking it. “But better, for the way that you move,” and her breath, against the wet trail she leaves, against the sensitive flesh she’s exposing: it’s ungodly. It is a phenomenon unto itself. “For the way that you _gasp_.”

And Sherlock, like this, as Mary’s first finger breaches, as John’s throat clenches as he takes Sherlock in, deep and full: like this, Sherlock does not disappoint.

“Oh, _fuck_ ,” he gasps, and his lungs are pure fire, clawing, seizing: he is an inferno, and John’s mouth doesn’t stop as he trembles, as he strains; Mary add a second finger, and for all the air that eludes him, whatever’s left inside him is expelled in a heady, broken huff.

“Soon, dearest,” John breathes out, smiles wicked up at him as he lets Sherlock slip from his mouth, lets Sherlock whimper for the loss before he bows his head further and fits his lips against Sherlock’s scrotum, and begins to painstakingly trace the testes, one and then the other, his palms anchored in the taut line of Sherlock’s thighs. 

“John, I’m, you’re, I’ll,” Sherlock starts to babble as he feels the pressure grow too unstoppable, feels the familiar, perfect hum at the back of his mind that will wipe it clean, that will bring him blankness and lightness and bliss without relent.

And then Mary’s hands are withdrawing as she straightens out, presses the full length of her body against Sherlock’s from behind; then John is drawing back with a tremulous kiss to the leaking tip of Sherlock’s shaft.

“No,” John breathes there, the words like ice against the bead of cum that’s gathered just so. “Not yet, babe.”

Sherlock keens, already wrecked, as his thighs shake wickedly as he breathes, heavy and hard through the unfulfilled threat of release.

“Your fingers are exquisite,” Mary breathes just beneath his ear, hot and wet as she laces her fingers into his own as she studies them, rotates his hand at the wrist and kisses his life line, his heart line, tongues the circumference of his ring before she moves to suck at the tips of each finger as she settles near his head, replaces his pillow and rests his curls to the side of her lap. “These hands are a goddamned national treasure.”

John, where he’s palming Sherlock’s still-shaking thighs, lifting Sherlock’s legs so as to settle in between, huffs: a challenge.

“His hands have got _nothing_ on his arse.”

John takes a handful of said piece of anatomy in either hand and squeezes, massages the flesh shamelessly in emphasis.

Given the way that Mary’s breath stutters behind him, around him, it’s obviously she’s watching, and it tangles gloriously in Sherlock chest, around his heavy-thumping rabbit heart to know that for all the tortuous, beauteous _thrill_ they’re giving him, he’s giving them something to, he’s enough in just _being_ here to set the flame in them, in kind. 

“Hmmm,” Mary rumbles, and it’s _obscene_. “We’ll call it a draw, shall we?”

John’s hot in between Sherlock’s spread legs, and Sherlock’s lungs are stretched to aching with the way he’s gasping, straining so for breath, and anywhere else, he’d be overwhelmed, ashamed of it, this lack of control, but here, _here_ —

Here, John leans in, the dry burn of his length caught stiff against Sherlock’s stomach as John leans in, flattens himself to Sherlock’s shivering ribs and presses his lips to the notch between Sherlock’s collarbones, breathes in deep and revelling: “Your chest is so...” John trails, nuzzles into the skin, back and forth along the median line as Sherlock’s heart pounds harder, _harder_ as John moans there, reckless, like a man entranced. 

“Not like yours,” Sherlock gasps, because he loves that broad splay of ribs, that strong line of bone and flesh and muscles around those perfect lungs, that priceless heart.

“No,” John agrees, mouth hot against the flush of Sherlock’s blood. “Not like mine,” he sighs, and Sherlock shivers, every pore and follicle shaking before John’s breath. 

“Lithe, sculpted, the lines of you,” John whispers, licking meaningless patterns across those lines, meaningless and yet _profound_. “You’re all coiled power, spiralled up around every bone and ligament, top to bottom,” John’s hands trail Sherlock’s sides from the shoulders to the jut of his hips. “I love touching you, feeling you.” John leans in again, and at the very touch of his mouth to Sherlock’s nipples, Sherlock tenses, arches harsh into John’s lips; when John sucks, Sherlock moans without restraint, nearly a sob.

“I love how sensitive these are,” John growls, sucks and kisses each bud, back and forth.

“I love that too,” Mary murmurs, and as John move back down Sherlock’s torso, Mary plays with the nipples, circles them and pinches, teases the flesh and gauges Sherlock’s breathing as he gasps, groans, pants. 

“I love how warm you are,” Mary whispers against him, kissing his neck and measuring the surge of his pulse as John slides into his body, the slip of him familiar, the angle practised and true. “I love the sound of you breathing as I fall asleep.”

“I love the shape of you,” John groans, fully seating himself in Sherlock before he leans, kisses Sherlock fierce. “The feel of you,” and John rocks, barely has to try to hit Sherlock’s prostate, and Sherlock sees eternity and the face of universal light for an instant, loses his breath as John breathes against him, thrusts in again: “My heart knows it, calms when you’re near, lets me dream.”

Sherlock whimpers, trembles: it’s too much, it’s not enough—it’s _everything_.

They’re _everything_.

“You taste delicious,” Mary exhales onto the skin she’s lapped damp around his jaw, his neck, his mouth. “You’re exquisite.”

“John, I’m not, I’m going to,” Sherlock gasps, because John’s pressing true every time, and John’s shaking inside him, twitching, and Sherlock can feel the way he’s swelling, the way he’s filling and aching, and he won’t last, he won’t last: “Mary,” he turns into Mary’s neck, sobs against her and begs for the unknown, for the infinite.

“John?” Mary murmurs, as she smoothes hands down Sherlock’s arms, his chest.

“Close,” John reaches with the hand not clutching at Sherlock’s hips to grasp for Mary, to unite the three of them, sequential, intertwined: “So close, Sherlock, hold on for me,” John’s voice breaks, and it’s a cry, it’s a whimper: “Can you hold on for me, love, can you let us give you just a little more, make this last a bit longer?”

And it’s unfathomable, the way it strikes Sherlock to the very soul: the way that John begs Sherlock to resist for _himself_ , to be better tended, to be gifted greater, to be loved all the more.

Incredible.

“God,” Sherlock gasps out, wet and shattered: “Yes,” he pants: “ _yes_.”

“Perfect,” John murmurs, and his rhythm grows shallow, just teasing Sherlock now as the cadence starts to lilt: “You’re so perfect,” John exhales, shrill: “If it was possible, I’d never draw away from you, I’d keep you like this, in bed and steeped in ecstasy, always.”

Sherlock moans, breathes deep, and tries not to give himself over to the feel of John tightening, pressing, faltering within his warmth.

“Sherlock,” John gasps, wrecked too, and Sherlock gathers all of the resolve he possesses, still, to clench around John’s swollen length, coaxing the man he loves to climax without surrendering himself. 

“Sherlock!” John cries out, strangled: “Oh, _god_ —” 

“John,” Sherlock chokes around the feeling, breathless, still a gaggle of live-wires as John goes boneless against him: “John, my John...” 

“Your pulse is all caught up with the way he’s shaking,” Mary whispers, sudden, electricity in Sherlock’s veins where she’s pressed against the bounding of his blood. “That’s beautiful, Sherlock,” she murmurs, mouth to skin: “Can you feel him? Does it sync?”

Sherlock catches John’s eyes, dazed as they are, and if they blink in time—with each other, with their own hearts, it’s a promise and a testament and it only takes a moment for Sherlock to feel the beat in Mary’s chest like an avalanche: just in time.

“Mary,” John whispers, spent and yet steadfast as he slips from Sherlock, elicits a whimpering cry as he avoids touching Sherlock’s straining cock, tries not to make the effort of restraint any more intense as he reaches for Mary, invites her to swap places, and that’s the beauty, Sherlock thinks, with the part of his mind still capable of it: this wholeness is a myriad of possibilities, a chaosmic whirlwind of infinitude.

“Mary,” Sherlock breathes out, barely heard, as Mary eases herself toward him, pulls him into her moves about him, calculated and careful as she balances her shape, her weight, and plants her feet, anchors them against his frame.

“Relax, my sweet,” she whispers, smiling with such love that it clenches in Sherlock chest, tangible, and distracts him for an instant from the need in the pit of his gut.

“Mary, you, what are you—”

“My balance is a bit off, mind,” she sighs; “Steady me?”

“Mary,” Sherlock says again, eyes wide, uncertain, but he reaches for her, as does John, now settled in behind Sherlock as Mary splays the centre of her, angles as best she can as Sherlock stares on, breathless: as Mary reaches to position his shaft before she eases herself around his length.

“Move with me,” she breathes, her eyes wide as Sherlock fills her, as her heat makes him weak: as the scent of her and the weight of her consumes him for an instant, before the raging need to peak, to spill, to tumble down into nothingness and trust that he’ll be caught overwhelms once more.

He _moves_.

“Mary,” he gasps, and he’s already close when John’s fingers breach him from behind, when John slips straight in where Sherlock’s still slick from John’s release.

“Oh, fuck, _John_ ,” and there is no air, there is _no air_ , but Sherlock cannot mind it, Sherlock will never care in the face of _this_ —

“You’re beautiful,” Mary gasps as she clenches around his thrust, just enough “God, you’re...”

“Immaculate,” John breathes against the hollow of his back: “Truly, I can’t—”

“Impossible,” Sherlock moans, and it _is_ a sob, and it trembles through him like a storm: “You’re both impossible, I don’t, I can’t—”

“You are,” John mouths against him, hands wrapped now around his chest and holding, clutching.

“You do,” Mary pants, and Sherlock’s nearly wrecked beyond return: “you can.” 

“Always,” John gasps at the base of Sherlock’s neck, and that’s what sends him seizing vicious, rapturous, surrendered to delirium as he kisses Mary through the whole of his release. 

There are moments, there are minutes, there are long breathes that follow in a daze; Sherlock doesn’t mind the details, save that he is everywhere _warm_.

“This.” 

The word penetrates, and he recognises that he’s been tended to, skin wiped clean and body settled straight in the centre of the bed, and he is awash in a bliss beyond his understanding or capacity to wholly grasp, to be here, in the very middle, held between halves of a heart that thrums, that sings for all that this is, for all that they’ll _be_ , and when John exhales on the very edges of sleep, he speaks only the truest of words:

“ _This_ is the life.”


	7. Part Seven

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To everyone who helped make this happen, and who encouraged the writing of this fest of sentiment—thank you so, so much. 
> 
> Happy Valentine's :)

Mary’s used to being woken up, now, by a shift or a roll or a kick from the baby, but she’s not sure it’s ever been quite so insistent, so emphatic, so…

She waits for the haze of sleep to start clearing before the word comes to her: _enamoured_.

There’s something breathless and full of wonder that takes her, as she soaks in the feeling of the baby moving wildly inside her, strong against a hand held upon her stomach from without. 

Her lips curl upward as she registers the soft rumble of words in a language not her own: that familiar, gorgeous baritone whispering endless as those perfect fingers stroke along the swell of her middle. 

_Enamoured_ , indeed. The baby takes after her, in that regard, but it’s not one-sided.

Mary reaches a hand to cover Sherlock’s on her belly, holding his palm to the enthusiastic motion of the life inside, and Sherlock gasps, just slightly, and she catches the rapid fire of his pulse at the wrist: he’s just as enthralled.

She’s grinning, full-stop, as her eyes open, as her pupils widen to find him in the dark.

“Oh,” he breathes, and his own eyes are the first thing she makes out: big circles, stretched wide and innocent, and oh, how she adores this man. “Did I wake you?”

“Not directly,” Mary smiles, squeezes his fingers before she leads his touch, rubs both their hands against her stomach. “This one was getting excited,” Mary tells him, fondly, and she suspects from the way he ducks his head, just a tad, that he’s blushing when she asks without needing to, her joy full inside the words: “Having a midnight chat?”

“Mmm,” Sherlock hums, leans in to kiss the heel of Mary’s hand around his own.

“What were you saying?” Mary dares to ask him, soft: she’d caught a word here or there through the lifting veil of sleep, but not enough, and, well.

Her daughter— _their_ daughter—had apparently found a great deal to love in whatever words he’d spoken.

Sherlock’s quiet, for a long span of moments, long enough for Mary’s eyes to have adjusted to the dim, for her to see the blank look he’s giving nothing, staring into oblivion, unfocused, and she’s afraid she’s pushed too far, moves to retract the question and make amends just as he finally speaks:

“I was telling her,” and Sherlock’s voice is rough, unsettled, unbalanced, and when he drops his head lightly against Mary’s hand, against the curve of Mary’s belly, it feels less like a comfort and more like a need. 

“I was telling her I’d,” he breathes in heavy, shaky: “Well…”

Mary laces their hands together,a nd their tangled fingers catch a soft nudge from the womb below, and Sherlock laughs, wet and soft and honest, so _true_ , and if there’s a dampness in Mary’s own eyes, she can’t be blamed for it: not like this, right here.

“I told her that you chose me, tonight,” Sherlock whispers, delicate like he cannot fathom it, still—like it may still shatter and leave him without cover for all that he’s bared himself raw. “That you asked me to stay, forever.”

His voice catches, cracks on that word, that promise, and Mary’s breath catches, goes still for it, too, because it’s beautiful. 

It is so fucking beautiful and it’s hers.

It’s _theirs_. 

“That you asked me to be a constant for you both, and for her, and that nothing has ever felt _right_ before this, before all of you...” 

He gasps breathless, careful, as if he’s still unsure whether the words can be said, as if he isn’t yet accustomed to the fact that this exists in truths and facts, tangible gestures and symbols and vows, in blood and the beating of their hearts as one: it’s not just a figment, a maybe, a fever dream.

Mary’s heart twists, and she reaches down to gather both of Sherlock’s hands in her own and hold them tight to her body, to the bright star of joy shifting glorious, moving and turning and growing inside her. 

“I told her that I,” Sherlock’s voice lowers, strains, and sounds so desperately young: “I told her that I cannot wait to meet her,” and his thumbs stroke soft against the flesh of Mary’s stomach: “To be caught in her grasp in person as she’s somehow managed already in the heart.”

And oh, that heart, that heart that’s so unfathomable is given unashamed, infused and revealed— unbound—in his words, in his eyes, and those perfect-sculpted features are so soft, so relaxed and nearly glowing, even in the dark.

“I told her that it,” he swallows, and his eyes catch what small light streams in: “it made no sense to love something, someone I’d never seen, and yet,” his voice drops, and his head presses against Mary’s skin as he breathes so she can feel it, warm and sweet: 

“I’d kill and die for her as much as any one of you,” Sherlock whispers, and he’s a beautiful liar: he said he’d never swear another vow, and yet, he’s promised, _given_ more than any of them, more than they’d ever dreamed: “She is precious, she is necessary, she is...”

Sherlock nuzzles at Mary’s midsection, and when he kisses the flesh where it curves broad he looks up at her, gaze glittering, and she is overcome, struck breathless: this is hers.

_How_ is this _hers_?

“I was telling her I’d never been wanted before, never been part of a whole, never _felt_ whole myself before this,” Sherlock’s words spill over her, warm and thick and filled with a feeling she cannot name but wants to bask in, always.

“I promised her that you, each of you, would never cease to be my everything,” Sherlock mouths more than speaks into Mary’s middle: “I asked her forgiveness in advance for all the mistakes that I’ll make, and I—”

“You are magnificent,” Mary cuts him off. “You are unimaginable and far beyond what I’ve earned in this world, Sherlock Holmes,” and she’s unable to keep the words back, the joy, and depth of her _gratitude_ for this soul wrapped up in her own, in John’s, in this child between them: she is _overcome_ , and the words spill out before she can stop them, stronger than she can name. 

“God, I love you,” Mary breathes, cupping Sherlock’s chin and meeting his eyes with a fondness she didn’t know she could feel quite like this, with one man snoring softly beyond them, so present and perfect, and the other warm against her, boneless and sublime.

“She loves you,” Mary strokes Sherlock’s hand again against her stomach: “We all love you, so dearly I can barely stand it,” she laughs, but it’s more than the thrill and the wonder, it’s the _ache_ that screams ecstatic in her blood as she chokes around its enormity:

“And I don’t know how I’d breathe if it was gone.”

“Mmmm,” John’s sleep-glazed hum breaks the intensity of Sherlocks glistening stare as a tear escapes Mary’s own eyes. “Is our Baby Watson-Holmes conspiring to steal her parents’ sleep already?” 

John’s back to sleep, his breath deep again in moments—it’s a blessing he’s only enjoyed of late, the ability to sleep and dream only of the good. Even after Sherlock returned, the nightmares persisted, but once they’d come together like this, once they shared a bed as three—as they were meant to, Mary _believes_ that—John slept in the peace he always deserved, lazy and gentle and deep.

So John’s already snuffling back to sleep when Sherlock’s eyes widen, when Sherlock’s jaw drops and his body tenses, and Mary shifts, concerned, when she feels his pulse start hammering at the wrists.

It’s dark, and it’s warm, and she’s comfortable and seeped in this inexplicable joy: she doesn’t realise what’s struck him so desperately until she runs the last moments through her head thrice more.

_Baby Watson-Holmes_.

Oh. _Oh_.

She can read it clearly in his face, once she knows to look: _John was half asleep, he didn’t know what he was saying, he didn’t mean_—

“You impossible fool,” Mary breathes, reaching and pulling Sherlock back up to face her, to meet her warm gaze with his overfull stare, all shock and disbelief, and she leans in, kisses him full and hard and says with their lips together all that she needs to slow the heavy thrum of his pulse: 

_Of course he meant it, you idiot, I told you that you’d be everything to her, everything that we will be, if you want to be, because everything you want of this, of us, is yours entire._

“We are yours,” Mary murmurs into his mouth, smiling and clutching him close to her chest. “We are all of us yours, and you are ours.”

She kisses him swift, deliberate, emphasising the point, hard and true over, and over, and over, and it isn’t enough but she has forever to prove it, to make him _believe_ it beyond any sliver of doubt.

"So never,” she says between one kiss and the next: “ _never_ again expect anything less.”

She kisses him, implores him to _believe_.

Given the way he kisses her back, she thinks he's starting to.


	8. Fic Cover

Concerning Roses, and the Keepers of the Bees by hitlikehammers

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